How can learning about general relativity & oxytocin improve your public relations strategy?

Photo by zhengtao tang

Look mom, we have become goldfish!

That’s a goldfish - notorious for its short attention span of 9 seconds. If that’s surprising, you should know that Millennials are almost there at a short 12 seconds, and the average attention span for Gen Z stands at a mere eight seconds; that’s almost 50% of the world’s inhabitants struggling to focus on a topic for more than 10 seconds.

At the same time, the daily time spent with internet per capita worldwide is at an average of 3 hours daily, going up to as much as 10 hours in tier-1 digital countries. You can do the math to estimate how many times consumers switch context from one topic to another in one day, but what’s worth pondering is how much Brand’s would be struggling with their content & PR distribution strategies in such a scenario

Reaching out to the right audience is difficult - be it an initiative for acquiring more customers, or simply engaging the existing ones, it’s getting increasingly difficult for both brands and customers to filter out signals from noise. Unlike a couple of years back, where brands could roll out a handful of once-a-month blanket strategies, each one an above-the-line campaign, making oneself visible to the community is not an easy task any more. Withing the cross-device, cross-channel and cross-brand ecosystem, customers are gliding through myriad of experiences everyday, and in that scenario, making them to pause and look at your offerings and expecting them to share it across can not be done on a blanket basis - in fact not even using a segment based strategy, which is the de facto approach in the industry today.

So, what’s to learn?

I have spent the past couple of months interviewing hundreds of brands, journalists and publishers asking them how they manage to deal with this noise and manage to get things done, and I have identified a series of interesting patterns. At a broad level, the learnings revolve around 4 key ideas -

1. General relativity beats Quantum mechanics hands down in the PR battlefield

The title of this section is definitely debatable and confusing, but let me take a shot at explaining it.  In quantum mechanics, every element can be broken down into discrete smaller elements - e.g. this screen to atom, atom to electrons and so on until we reach plank’s dimension. In general relativity, however, the elements and their smaller subsets are continuous and events move in a continuum. General relativity requires spacetime to be really smooth, or continuous. Every event and point can be identified no matter how small you go. Quantum mechanics on the other hand is all about Quantization and discreteness. Traditionally, brands and PR professionals have taken a very discrete approach to running their campaigns - launching an initiative only when an event occurs (eg. new releases, acquisitions, fundraising etc.). Even though this yields more determinism in terms of reconciling the effects of these initiatives, the impressions are not effective enough to engage the customers. Engaging in a continuum not only ensures consistent impressions and more certainty of reaching the right audience, but if done well, they can also help narrate a seamless story of the brand (more under point 4)

Creating simpler value props and messaging with micro-communities (thinking customer segment of 100, if not 10)

Product companies such as Netflix & Amazon understand that every individual has different preferences - I love watching thriller TV series whereas everyone else in my team at Glyph would happily grab popcorn for a comedy show. Product companies obviously have the upper hand by having access to an individual’s visits, purchases, browsing behavior and that can’t be discounted, but what emerged as a common theme in all our interviews was how the better brands are trying to look at their customers across the dimensions of value proposition, their expectations, their wants etc. By using multiple dimensions to cut their segments, they are able to create very simple value props tailored to each community, and that’s allowing them to build and scale micro-communities; each community with a single and specific north star.

With respect to engaging within each micro-community, building an influence strategy is extremely vital and a good network effect that includes famous people -  public figures, and local celebrities could be a huge win. In the modern world, such micro-influencers can also be a powerful way to grow a company’s presence online. More often than not, especially in today’s digital placements, people tend to trust the opinion of famous people more than the publicly expressed ideas of any company or brand. Influencers by definition have built an audience around their interests and therefore you can clearly know what that audience is looking for (no need for second guessing/testing) and tap into it with your messaging in a more confident and direct way.

With the advent of influencer driven narratives, there is also a growing tendency in customers to avoid following big and faceless organisations -  they would rather prefer to be a part of a micro-community where they can mutually share ideas and experience to be left wandering in a noisy ecosystem where they can’t share their opinion. As a customer, you are more likely to trust the opinion of your frequented hairdresser, than that of a TV ad. The power of word of mouth marketing cannot be understated, and nothing better than doing that in a group where you know what exactly excites your customers.

2. Experimentation over assumption - why second-order theory of mind is risky

Original tweet here: https://twitter.com/stevestuwill/status/1405474550037450766?s=21

Public relations has a very strong art-heavy origin, Brands would do some research and derive what customer’s think about them. In a lot of cases, the research may not have a fair bit of representation, or there might be biases in brands that percolate into their PR activities. We have all seen and heard stories of PR failures where the brands operated via the perspective of “we think this would be good”. This strategy is not unseen in the general public and even startups - majority of them tend to build a product because “they think others would need it”. Such second-order theory of mind, where we expect others to expect in a particular manner, is very common, and in a lot of cases is backed by false belief leading to poor PR outcomes. In order to avoid these higher-order biases, it is important to have access to a platform that allows continuous (we’re again talking about quantum mechanics, are we?) listening and responding on social and other channels. The ability to listen to consumer voices all the time, be able to manage trends, drill them down to specific geographics, socio-demographics and other aspects and quickly respond and ride over those trends is a utility that’s almost mandatory for brands today.

3. Stories over everything else - remember how did kids grow up

Everyone loves a good story. When we hear a story that resonates with us, our levels of oxytocin increase, boosting our feelings of trust, togetherness and empathy. A group of neuroscientists at Princeton university found that when we listen to a beautiful narrative, the sensory evocations and the areas where they are felt are the same as those observed in the brain of the storyteller. Quite amazing, isn’t it? There are many more studies and tales to support why stories have a unique ability to build connections - brands that have managed to do this well and tap into the power of storytelling have seen tremendous success in building a base of engaged fans. Just look at airbnb, Minnetonka, Nike, Chobani  - remember their ads, their media releases, and everything they do on social? Everything they do has so much coherence with what they have done in the past, their values, and what they hold for their customers in the future. Just doing more media releases and getting 100s of influencers is not enough -  it is very important that all the dots over time can be stitched into something beautiful. A well narrated story.

What hasn’t changed in the past 100 years?

Even though Public relations has many definitions propounded and applied in the industry, Edward Bernays, one of the pioneers of PR, stated that "The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, and integrating people with people.” No matter how many decades it has been since PR first came into action, the fundamentals haven’t changed much. It’s just that while back in the 1900s a mass PR approach would have done its job, PR today has to be way more granular and accelerated than we see it happening.