Selling Emotion on the Web
Recently, I attended an American Marketing Association event here in Phoenix on the topic of Emotional Advertising and Advertising Effectiveness. E. B. Lane presented an excellent case study on their client, Cable One. Cable One was faced with increased competition from satellite providers, and therefore, decreasing retention of their customers. E. B. Lane determined that a strong emotional sell would be the best way to improve customer satisfaction and would lead to customer acquisition.
At the end of the presentation, they showed five or six television advertisements centered around the tag line, “Watch us make you smile.” The campaign was focused on the personal side of Cable One and how a company that cares about its customers, listens more and out performs the competition.
At the end of the presentation, a lady asked the questions, “How do you extend this emotional sell on to the website?” It seemed clear that understanding the Cable One strategy and creative for this group of professionals was a no-brainer, but trying to apply these techniques to the Internet was the mystery.
Here’s my attempt to answer her question. In the advertisements, Cable One is making the promise that when you deal with them on the phone and in person, they are going to make every effort to be prompt, courteous and understanding. What needs to be done on the website is to continue to answer this promise. This is more than tacking the new tag line in the upper corner and showing copies of the TV ad encoded in the latest video format. Instead, Cable One needs to make it extremely easy for customers to find out about services in their area, get a hold of service reps, or anything else that would allow the customer to watch Cable One make them smile.
This is where the advertising agency, the customer service department, and the web team need to get into a room and figure it out. Marketers can no longer look at a website as a online brochure or interactive advertisement. Instead, they need to treat these interactions as if they were a point of sale transaction, customer service call, or billing discussion. Interactions with the website can make or break that customer relationship just like the physical interaction Cable One was trying to influence. It also can’t be left to the web team alone to know how to handle these high touch relationships. Unless the company outsources their web work to a highly trained marketing company (shameless plug), IT professionals are not going to understand the intricacies of branding that occur during the customer experience.
So, to sell the emotion online, you have to actually live up to the promise of the advertisements. It will take effort, consistency, and practicing. But those who do it well, can truly separate themselves from the competition.
