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September 18, 2024
Why Do Consumers Feel Ignored by Marketers?
Advertisers are letting their personal biases guide their targeting methods, causing them to overlook 44% of Americans who feel ignored by ads.
That’s according to the second annual New American Consumer Study from iHeartMedia and Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries.
The study, which surveyed 237 marketers and nearly 4,000 consumers in separate polls, found marketers out of touch with consumers’ interests. Some of the key findings include:
- Consumers place twice the emphasis marketers do on religion and law and order, despite both groups agreeing on the primary values of family, health, and safety.
- Pickleball and tennis top the list of activities marketers consider cool, while hunting, fishing, and buying lottery tickets are favored by consumers.
- Marketers favor many health and diet trends, while consumers find cold plunges and vegan/vegetarian diets “cringeworthy.”
“As marketers, we need to be reminded that we are not the target for most of our marketing campaigns,” said Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia, in a statement. “There’s a big opportunity to improve marketing results with a more conscious focus on the real-life influences that the majority of consumers rely on — and by more accurately reflecting our customers’ real values, passions and priorities.”
The consumer survey also found that a full 67% of respondents hate being “trailed” by targeted ads. Seven out of 10 said the ads are irrelevant despite being targeted. Instead, 82% of consumers say they are influenced by their communities, friends, family, and religious leaders.
“Today’s consumers are acutely aware of their social and economic environment and hold higher expectations for the brands that target them, sometimes relentlessly, based on the very traits that define their individuality,” said Gladwell. “This study is crucial in revealing the underlying biases that often inadvertently shape marketing strategies.”
Other studies have also called out marketers’ disconnect with consumers.
New research from GWI found that UK marketers are 58% more likely to want brands to feel “young” than the average consumer and 87% more likely to want brands to appear “trendy,” yet only 8% of UK consumers want brands to portray a “youthful” image. Marketers were also found to be 97% more likely than consumers to buy products recommended by influencers and 67% more likely to feel represented by advertising compared to the average consumer.
A study last year from Bango Audiences, based on responses from consumers and marketers in the U.S. and UK, found that two-thirds (66%) of consumers said the majority of the digital ads they see are irrelevant to their interests or needs, with 39% labeling these ads as “excessive,” 32% as “random,” and 27% as “intrusive.” Over half (57%) of ad professionals agree that the broad “spray and pray” approach to digital ad targeting is “not effective.”
Discussion Questions
What’s driving the apparent disconnect between marketers and consumers in targeting efforts?
Do you chalk it up to personal biases, antiquated approaches, dirty data, or something else?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Georganne Bender
Principal, KIZER & BENDER Speaking
John Lietsch
CEO/Founder, Align Business Consulting
Dick Seesel
Principal, Retailing In Focus LLC
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I think there are two issues here. The first is that a lot of mass marketing is fairly generic, so it will always have a general rather than a highly targeted appeal. This has always been true, although it may start to shift digitally as AI is able to create deeper levels of personalization. The other point is that marketing can be an insular industry which is driven by trends and fads rather than being fully informed by what the consumer really wants. There’s always a tendency to try and make a splash with marketing or do something cutting edge or different and perhaps this steers marketers away from reality.
I have a better question: why are so many “studies” out-of-touch with anything useful?? Marketers are hired to promote certain products; while it’s certainly useful for them to understand their target audience, it’s utter gibberish to imply they’re supposed to be some kind of reflection of society at large.
The good news is that this means that there’s still hope for humanity! There ARE people that aren’t blindly buying the hype!
It’s difficult to say what the disconnect is but maybe it has to do with “fad pumping” (the endless search for the next big thing), ego (we can sell ice to penguins), self-fulfilling prophecies (of course they buy from influencers) and a dash of elitisms (ivory tower syndrome). It’s not really a surprise since this disconnect appears to also be prevalent in other areas like news and politics. I think sometimes we just convince ourselves that our reality is “the reality” (and that’s pretty human).
Retargeting is evil. Everyone I know thinks so. I suppose it’s cheap and yields some ROI, but it sure isn’t brand building.
I think marketers, who were flying high before the pandemic, have come back down to earth. Now they have to behave, know their customers, use the technologies that are provided for them (instead of their agency’s or systems they create with their own budgets). They’re just not doing it.
The pendulum is just swinging again.
My company has a saying that we live by, “Listen to your customers, they’re smarter than you.” It’s true and marketers would be well advised to embrace it.
As a Baby Boomer, marketing for me includes people with a wide variety of health issues who have fallen and can’t get up, hearing aids, pain relief, brain health… I could go on and on. These things are necessary, but not every Boomer has one foot in the grave.
Advertising has a tendency to stereotype people based on the creator’s point of view or the company’s desired coolness factor. Here’s an idea: Look around and then create ads that resemble actual people.
Oh, the irony. We are awash in customer data yet can’t find the formula to make people jump to buy the things we’re selling. Perhaps the answer lies in that many brands like to believe that they are something that they’re not? Then that insidious “tribal knowledge” reinforces the way that brands think they are perceived, customer data be damned. We know best! Ummmm….
Best example of the last decade was Ron Johnson’s big idea for JCPenney that shoppers wanted “fewer but better” options. He took away coupons. He slashed the assortment. He “cleaned up” the store. He didn’t understand that female shoppers fancy themselves the CFO of Their Household and that finding deals and bargains was the key. She responded by eliminating JCP from her shopping routine.
Under Johnson’s leadership–and total lack of understanding about what the JCP brand meant to people–same-store sales fell 25% in his first year, resulting in a $4.3B (yes, Billion with a B) revenue decline. JCP recorded a $1B loss, and their stock fell to $18. JCP still hasn’t recovered more than a decade later.
Completely agree. Despite all the available data, most marketing is what marketers want to say not what their potential customers want to hear. You can move a brands position, but it has to start with acknowledging the starting point.
Use data. Try. Measure. Refine. Improve. It’s not hard but it’s tedious and it’s not always going to be what you think it is.
I was fortunate to find the “on” switch for my ears once. The result was a dramatic change in the success of our company. We replaced all the copy we created talking to ourselves with the words captured from interviews with our customers.
The young marketing Turks of every generation are doomed, I think, to repeat the same rookie mistakes. They can’t help believing that the brands they are representing need to appeal most to talented people like them. Make the message cool enough, trendy enough, creative enough, and they can garner Clio awards bestowed by a jury of their peers.
I don’t mean to be dismissive. It’s just that we have seen this syndrome so may times before. There certainly are brilliant young marketing minds out there who break ground and drive massive brand equity across demographic markets. Most, however, haven’t put in the unglamorous grunt work to truly understand what drives their audiences.
So yes, I do think generational bias has a great deal to do with this. I’d propose that young brand marketers rediscover the life-stage/life-style analyses that help them segment consumers into more uniform sub-groups. Then study the motivations that connect each with your brand value proposition. Some segments may be poor prospects for what you’ve got to sell. Focus your messaging on the ones with highest potential.
Only then should the creative process and the media planning commence.
As I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but wonder how marketers could not know their customers as well as they should and need to. Personalization in the customer experience falls into two areas. First is customer interactions where the customer wants to feel like whoever they are doing business with knows who they are as they make their purchase., Second, is when the company is marketing to them. In today’s world, marketers have the tools to know so much about their customers that when they send marketing and sales messages, the customers feel the company or brand is talking directly to them. Those that get it get repeat business. Those that don’t, get random business at best.
I don’t believe the general hypothesis that people feel they don’t get enough ads related to themselves. We hate ads. There are too many. Diversity has never been greater in marketing, and niching to someone who loves trout, guns, and scuba diving has never been easier. What are these studies supposed to show us, really?
Sorry, but consumers can’t have it both ways. You can’t complain about being targeted by ads and (with the next breath) complain that your specific interests are being ignored. Marketers deal with the data they have, to reach the pickleballer or the hunter.
One need look no further than the semi-recent Bud Light controversy for some proof that marketers are not (okay-in many cases, not all) aligned with the markets and products they are responsible for. The team in that case “just decided” that the brand needed to appeal to a different group of customers than…the customers they were already serving. We know the rest of that story.
The root cause is two fold-too much reliance on the gods of PPC and SEO, and a cadre of marketers who tilt more to activism outside of their job, and are not experienced enough to leave that part of their “persona” in the car when they walk into the office.
My focus is the wealthy. I routinely meet marketers who think their life experiences mirror those with financial capacity. It doesn’t. Their cognitive bias gets in the way of their firm’s success.
Marketers who don’t understand their clients will fail. It’s too easy to target any niche you desire. Data is too plentiful to miss incompetence or hide it.
The fail in the research is we don’t know who answered the questionnaire. So it’s very difficult to respond intelligently. Perhaps you see the corollary.
The overall decline in polling participation and accuracy in the last two decades does give the biases of the modeler more and more weight, no matter how well-intentioned (and of course there are a lot of mal-intentioned analysts out there.) My daughter is in a product design track at the U of MN, and taking a statistics course right now – glad to see they are teaching the new generation how to be skeptical & ask better questions from Marketing!
With so many consumers feeling ignored by ads, it highlights the importance of using insights that reflect real-life values and priorities.
It makes me think about how the best social media management tools could help businesses better understand and connect with their audience, rather than just relying on generic targeting methods that may fall flat.
The gap between what consumers value and what marketers push is pretty eye-opening.