Would you like to join our conversation? Do you want a voice in what we are doing? Do you care? Or do you just want to be left alone to make up your own damn mind and vote with your purchase or lack there of?

I was chatting with a colleague the other day when the conversation lead us onto the subject about engaging (interacting with) our target audiences instead of interrupting (just getting stuff in front of) them, which of course has been a huge shift in strategic communications for the past few years. The area where we got into the most heated discussion was around the Yukon middle class and how to engage them. More specifically, the average middle class family who has a heck of a lot more on their mind then being bothered with our, or our clients agenda. I was left pondering this for most of the afternoon, are we choosing the right strategies for the right target audience. Later on that day I was sent this blog entry.

It is a fictional letter (of course it is) describing one average Joe’s frustration over a sausage company’s new campaign strategy to engage their audience in making viral video commercials on how to sell their product. The writer describes his disgust with this level of engagement and misunderstanding that this company really felt he had time or even cared that much about sausages to waste his free time taking part in this campaign.

So my question is, in the real world in the busy family lives of parents - are our expectations for their level of engagement too high? Or do we simply go back to trying to interrupt them in the hope that we can make a crack into their busy lives?

What is it that makes some brand communications pieces compelling and others bland, feeble or even invisible? Well, we’ve got a theory for that, based on these three principles: Engagement, Evocation (or sometimes Provocation) and Connection.

Engagement

Compelling communications pieces are like apples: they’ve got appealing, shiny red exteriors (pantone 485, aasman red of course) to attract attention, tasty and wholesome stuff to sink your teeth into, and a core that represents the essential idea of “apple-ness.”

To develop compelling communications, you need to start at the core of the apple, with:

• a thorough understanding of your own brand values
• how they relate to your particular audience, and
• a clear articulation of the specific thing you want to say to them.

This is the simple, unvarnished Core Message: the information that your organization needs to communicate to an identified audience. However, this is not necessarily how you want to say it.

That’s because compelling communications results when you engage an audience emotionally, not intellectually. It’s about desire, fear and happiness, not numbers, information and rationale (although those can play a role later). And the reason for that, as Terry O’Reilly likes to say, is that you can’t logic your way into someone’s heart. To engage an audience, you must project, ask or state some aspect of your core message in a way that evokes an emotional response.

We call that the Shiny Red Message — the SRM.

Next time: En = EvSRM + MCM (Theory of Compelling Communications)