Organizations like yours spend, in total, billions of dollars annually to get people to buy a product, embrace a brand, follow a candidate, or join a cause. And yet we can all agree that these marketing campaigns, ads, public relations initiatives, communication programs, and social media and change efforts are—to be kind—often less effective than they could be. If you are honest, you’ll admit you need help forging a lasting bond with the people you hope to influence.
To create that bond, organizations need a single, reliable guiding principle to ensure that all their marketing and communications efforts make a sustained impact. It can be summed up in a single word: relevance.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines relevance as “being practical and especially social applicability.” And we think that’s right, although we have found most people misread the definition, putting almost all their emphasis on the practical. That’s understandable. It is certainly true that what you are offering must solve a customer need and do it well.
But increasingly, that is not enough. Customers are becoming progressively fickle, as well as spoiled. They expect superior execution on your part. That is the price of entry, and, unfortunately, it’s not something that will guarantee a long-term relationship. A slip on your part or a customer’s encounter with a competitor that does what you do slightly better, or just as well at a lower price, and your customer may well abandon you.
And that is where the emotional part of relevance comes in. If your product/service/idea resonates with a customer, if it means something to him in addition to being utilitarian, then the relationship will be deeper, longer lasting, and more profitable. For example, value and dependability are the bedrocks of the ideal shopping experience. So providing those two things is absolutely necessary, but they give you no competitive advantage, because the other companies battling with you to gain market share are providing them, as well. If all you do is what everybody else does, you’ll never gain an edge.
But Generation Y shoppers, according to our research, are much more likely—twice as likely as Baby Boomers, in fact—to say their favorite retailer delivers an experience that they’d like to share. The “shareability” component underscores the new social experience this cohort is looking for both offline and online. It’s what is required to be relevant to them.
This is why relevance is so important. Unlike other objectives marketers have aspired to—engagement, “eyeballs,” alignment, buzzes, clicks, and stickiness, for example—relevance has the power to change both minds and behavior. Those Gen Y shoppers, for example, are going to search out retailers that provide experiences they want to share, leaving behind the ones that don’t.
Look at It Another Way
Here’s another reason why relevance is so important. You can’t get people to do things if they don’t hear you. Sure, you can keep raising the volume on what you have to say to the point where people know you are trying to communicate with them. But the only way they are going to pay attention is if you can create an emotional connection. What you have to say needs to resonate. Your message must be personal if you want your audience to consider seriously what you have to say.
The connection also explains why customers will stay with you. It is easy for them to switch to another brand, and your customers will unless they feel some sort of personal connection to your offering. What’s clear from both these situation is that relevance brings power, depth, and sustainability to the relationships we all have with companies, brands, and causes.
Unfortunately, many organizations have no idea whether they are relevant. Worse, they have no way to find out.
We are going to spend our time together examining relevance in all its complexity and outlining ways to generate and, ultimately, sustain it. By the time we are finished, you will understand not only what a powerful concept relevance is, but also how you can use it to leverage—perhaps exponentially—every part of your communications efforts.
Let’s begin by talking about why it is so important.
That Was Then, This Is Now
The world used to be a simpler place. Organizations offering a product, candidate, or cause were in the driver’s seat. People had far fewer choices than they have today. And that was true whether you were talking about the type of wine you wanted to buy or where you wanted to get your news, and everything in between. If an organization had a good story or product or service, that was typically enough to earn a sale, vote, or commitment to a cause.
No one would describe the world as simple today. It’s complex. Organizations face a new and daunting challenge: The people they are trying to reach are constantly bombarded with commercial messages that have made them cynical (to say nothing of the fact that they simply don’t have the time to pay attention to more than a handful). Consumers have an expanding universe of options and new ways to select them. There are terabytes of information at their fingertips and networks upon networks to help them discover their friends’ preferences and experiences with the things they are considering.
As attention spans shrink, messages, channels, and touch points are proliferating. Organizations need a reliable way to communicate effectively in this complicated new world, a way that is agile enough to adapt to dynamic conditions without sacrificing who they are.
They need a way to connect to the customers they are trying to reach. Every product, brand, and cause presents an opportunity for connection, but what will a person choose? Facing a staggering range of alternatives, people will connect with what is most meaningful to them. What seems most important. What is most relevant.
Relevance, often overlooked and certainly undervalued, has emerged organically as an ideal guiding principle for creating effective marketing programs in this new, unpredictable, much more complicated world we live in.
Adapted with permission from “Relevance: The Power to Change Minds and Behavior and Stay Ahead of the Competition,” by Andrea Coville (Bibliomotion, March 2014).
Andrea Coville is the CEO of Brodeur Partners, a global public relations agency headquartered in Boston, MA. She has managed the firm since 1999 and has led the agency’s emergence as a technology leader. A hands-on executive who had led several of the agency’s global accounts, Coville has guided strategic communications platforms for corporations and brands including Phillips, Toshiba, Mastercard, IBM, Fidelity Investments, and the American Cancer Society.
