The role of numbers
One of the more interesting deviations from our previous life is around the role of numbers in our marketing campaigns. Like many things, this has developed through an observation of how we are starting to think rather than out of design. However, it’s recently come into focus for me.
In the world of advertising, we often fought a not so silent war against numbers. Numbers tended to be nasty, inconvenient little things like prices, percentages, response mechanisms or, even worse, normative ad performance scores that often got in the way of creating images, emotions or feelings.
In our new life, however, numbers play an increasingly important part of how we market our clients. In fact, many of the “campaigns” we have and are proposing center around numbers of some sort or another.
An example of this is in a post I wrote while ago around ways to actually create response to climate change rather than simply talk about it. The idea there was to create a measurement – a warming index – a standardized way of understanding the impact of any given purchase upon the environment.
It turns out, that there is an equivalent measure (or measures) in many categories that can quickly impart a new understanding of that category and/or provide a new contextual framework for evaluating the various different players within the category.
However, as in the environmental example, the marketing is in the act of creating the measurement – not in the act of communicating the measurement. It is in providing an actionable framework for people to make their own decisions rather than in attempting to influence a decision. Numbers, because they provide an instantly comprehendible way to understand relative value or importance, enable people to make quick decisions and to act quickly.
Of course there’s no real new insight here. The numbers I referred to that we struggled against in our advertising lives were almost always “designed” to generate rapid response. The issue was that this attribute of numbers fought against our professional desire to create communications that engage, provoke and stimulate thought.
Freed from having to think about these kinds of things, it turns out we actually like numbers after all.
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