Grabbing and engaging

With its first wing set on an objective, wings 2 and 3 of the dragonfly can set about capturing the market’s attention and then engaging the market forces in productive manners, to care about your objective too. (2/3)

	Title:	The Dragonfly Effect
	Author:	Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith
	Pages:	211pages
	Publisher:	Jossey-Bass
	Price:	$25

For the first part of the series, click here.

The Dragonfly is the only insect able to propel itself in any direction, with tremendous speed and force, when its four wings are working in concert.  This was the inspiration for the concept of the “dragonfly effect”—an elegant, effective outcome in which individuals armed with just an internet connection and a few social tools produce colossal results, disproportionate to the small amount of resources used.

Four key skills are needed to achieve the Dragonfly Effect:  Focus, Grab Attention, Engage, and Take Action.  We will describe here the principles of Wings 2 and 3, and we will review Wing 4 in the next installment.

Wing 2, Grab Attention
Once you have created a single focused goal to provide direction, motivation, and operational guidance, the next step is to Grab Attention.  

Perhaps the most shocking—and persuasive—fact in the book is this:  by mid-2009, according to research from the well-regarded Forrester, only 6% of consumers said they believed marketers’ ad claims!  Fully 94% said they did not.  This is the strongest argument for using social media, because . . . who do consumers trust?  90% said they trust product recommendations from personal acquaintances, making those recommendations by far the most trusted form of advertising.  

Stanford Professor Aaker and guest lecturer/consultant Smith lay out four design principles for Grabbing Attention.  (Remember that design thinking is a creative process that encourages a human-centric orientation, hypotheses testing, and frequent rapid prototyping.  It protects against the frequent failure of initiatives that were developed with the brand, organization, or cause foremost in mind, rather than putting individuals’ needs first.)

Using these principles, Starbucks was able to “regrab attention” in the wake of a decline in its business in 2008-9 during which it was forced to close 900 of its 17,000 stores.  It began the turnaround by launching a “fair trade” campaign, becoming the world’s largest buyer of fair-trade certified coffee, and aiming to offer coffee farmers in Latin America and East Africa more rewarding opportunities.  It then developed tools in three social media channels to help it interact with customers, and integrate and manage feedback.   

•    On its website Starbucks created a “My Starbucks Idea” page, powered by Salesforce CRM (customer relationship management) functionality.  
•    A “Starbucks Ideas in Action” blog allowed it to describe actions it was taking and to seek feedback.
•    It used Twitter to send quick messages and updates to customers.

The result?  Aakers and Smith write, “Starbucks effectively grabbed the attention of the world with its socially responsible agenda.  A 2010 Web search on ‘Starbucks’ and ‘fair trade’ yielded more than 442,000 results, including mentions in every major media outlet as well as specialty publications—both online and offline—and thousands of blogs.”

Wing 3, Engage
And yes, Starbucks was also able to engage its customers.  After you have grabbed attention, Engagement is the next step—compelling people to care deeply, to become engaged emotionally.   

Again, design principles and social psychology research lead to four principles for achieving engagement.

Aakers and Smith offer a powerful summation of a brand:  a brand is “a reputation, based on a collection of memories.”  Furthermore, more significant to the brand than the products, advertising, visual shortcuts, and people are the EXPERIENCE the brand offers and the EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT people form as a result.  The four principles of engagement, then, describe how brand marketers can seed powerful, lasting memories.

The left side of the brain utilizes logic and reason to persuade, while the right side utilizes emotion.  Author Daniel Pink posits that “Right-brain dominance is the new source of competitive advantage”  in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future.  Aakers and Smith agree with Pink’s concept of building engagement through “uniting an idea with an emotion” by using compelling stories.  

For further research support, the authors cite the work of cognitive psychologist Roger Schank, who has affirmed that humans aren’t actually wired to understand logic—we are wired to grasp stories.  

Master storytellers then weigh in on how best to craft and tell a story—independent filmmaker Justine Jacob and Pixar Animation chief technical officer Oren Jacob describe how to think in story arcs, how to start wide with many stories and then boil them down, and how to know when to shut up so you don’t overexplain.

Way back in 2000 Procter & Gamble’s Pampers brand skillfully used engagement marketing to transform the Pampers website from a presentation of static brand information to a complete “new mom information portal.”  Pampers had found that first-time parents are confused, inexperienced, and tired—and that they care emotionally about their new baby, of course, to a powerful and profound extent.  The redesigned website, then, offered carefully chosen information on developmental issues, parenting best practices, and medical concerns, all tailored to assuaging and affirming the intense fears and emotions of the first-time parent.

As a result, even when store brands were undercutting Pampers’ prices significantly, Pampers sales rose from $718 million in 2001 to $826 million in 2006.  The account of this achievement spread, and other major brands spent millions of dollars trying to emulate Pampers’ success.

In part 3, we will review Wing 4, “Take Action.”


By Christine Arrington, published June 2011.