Marketers have a way of appropriating words.
‘Advocate’ is a good one – as in the brand is the consumers’ advocate. Many brands use the term in much the same way Sarah Palin used the word ‘maverick’.
‘Engagement’ is another word that has been gaining traction. (Traction, by the way, is another. OK you get the point.)
Engagement is used mainly in reference to the interaction that consumers have with brands in the online space. Forrester Research gave the word much of its meaning when it released a study last year.
Executive Summary: The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers' trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. Each of these is built from data collected from online and offline data sources. Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.
That's all fine but now ‘engagement’ is creeping into the marketing lingo for just about anything on or offline that refers to reaching, selling to, transacting with or interacting with consumers or customers.
I wish it were true. I wish the interactions consumers have with brands were truly engaging and that they included the four components of engagement Forrester talks about; involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence.
I recently enjoyed a hamburger from Harvey’s. Instead of promoting poutine that day, the tray liner was about ‘Our Promise To You’. I guess they call it the four Gs.
- Greet. We greet
you with a genuine smile.
- Grill. We
flame-grill and serve your burger hot.
- Garnish. We top
your burger the way you love it.
- Gratitude. We
sincerely thank you for choosing us.
I got to experience the Grill and the Garnish but not the Greet and Gratitude; no smile and no thank you, not even an insincere one. I had a great burger but I can’t say I was engaged. Nor, frankly, did I really want intimacy as my burger was being build into a beautiful thing.
My point is simply that not everything we sell can be engaging and not everyone wants to be engaged with dishwashing liquid or tomato juice.
Since every post on this blog should somehow relate to Quebec, here's the obligatory Quebec tidbit.
What is the best-tasting hamburger according to Quebeckers and Ontarians polled last April by Ipsos Reid on behalf of Harvey’s?
In Ontario, more respondents (38%) named Harvey’s as the fast-food burger restaurant with the best tasting burger, beating out its major competitors by a 2 to 1 margin. Two in ten Ontarians said that A&W (20%) and Wendy’s (20%) burgers were the best tasting, while others gave the title to Burger King (11%), McDonalds (10%) or Dairy Queen (2%).
In Quebec the race was tighter. While three in ten (30%) named Harvey’s as the best-tasting burger, a statistical tie ensued among McDonalds (21%), A&W (19%) and Burger King (16)% for second place. Rounding out the list include Wendy’s (8%), La Belle Province (5%), and Dairy Queen (1%).
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