When most folks talk about “targeting,” they mean selecting who they are aiming their messaging at.
When Emotional Context talks about targeting, we mean defining what it is that really matters to your customers. (If you get this right, they will find you!)
One example was a pharma research, with a new pediatric antibiotic.
The clients defined five different “features” (or attributes) of the medication, so we went looking into the minds and hearts of pediatricians to understand what was most important.
Surprise! While most pediatricians selected the field thinking they were going to be living the Robin Williams’ character “Patch Adams” each day (and having FUN with kids!), they had not anticipated the conflict they would have with compliance issues and “mom.”
They were discovering that “mom” was frequently only using antibiotics for long enough that her child would stop crying from the pain of the ear infection or whatever the problem was.
Many gentle children’s antibiotics had 10 day, 12 day, or even longer treatment regimens, but “mom” would stop halfway through and “save” the treatments for the next time. The pediatricians were angry and terrified by this behavior (Can you say “superbugs?”) and angrier at their feeling of helplessness to do anything about it. (In fact, the interviews had more profanity than we have ever witnessed in any other subject!)
Our client’s medication could be administered in just FIVE days, and pediatricians believed “mom” would complete this regimen.
Cut to the finish—none of the other four attributes mattered nearly as much as the five-day regimen, which was a slam-dunk winner all by itself. Knowing this helped the clients focus on what really mattered to the customer and not “distract” the message by emphasizing attributes that were pretty much expected to be similar to the competition.
Targeting the message to what really matters to the customers made for a spectacular product introduction.
But you have to dig deep into their hearts and minds to find out what it is that really matters (The conflict with mom and physician frustration had NOT appeared in focus groups, done before the emotional research.) You can’t press the “right buttons” if you don’t know what they are.
Discovering emotional motivators, in context, makes all the difference.
Following up– Put in psychological terms, the pediatricians were wrestling with two major conflicts. First, having “mom” defy their directions hampered their ability to cure the patient (the child), thus challenging their sense of Control. Second, this lack of compliance could lead to breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria (“superbugs”) which threatens their Identity as healers…they would lose one of their best tools AND, because of their failure to get compliance, feel like they were complicit in the disaster. The short administration time of the client’s product solved both of these problems, and the insight about what the problems are and how they work in customers guided messaging.
I need to point out that the insights from pediatricians came through methodology and technique, not just your average focus group or one-on-one interview. Emotional Context knows how to ease respondents into a relaxed state where they focus on visualizations of past experiences and lower their defenses. After a specific opening visualization (which ALWAYS makes doctors relax and reduce their posturing) we herded them to a series of challenges and decision points– open-ended things like “a time you are really feeling frustrated by your work”– and then used active listening and probing techniques to get them to reveal more and more about the things that matter. Analysis defined the similarities and we cross-referenced the needs and barriers with the product capabilities to recognize that one feature would address multiple conflicts. That was a home run.