Do the lengths companies go to research consumer habits today have any limits? It would seem not! Working with a research client for over 3 years I’m fully aware of companies employing neuroscience as a method finding out what makes consumers tick, but this takes the biscuit.

Earlier this year Royal Mail commissioned Millward Brown and Academics at Bangor University to undertake a study to determine if the brain reacts differently to marketing messages delivered through direct mail in comparison to email campaigns. This was based on the assumption that consumers tend to engage more to physical objects that they would to an electronic format.

Participants were shown the same creative format in both digital and print. Following this a measurement of brain activity was taken in the MRI scanner to identify parts of the brain that show increased activity by imaging changes in the blood supply.

The research showed that certain parts of the brain were more active when given a piece of physical direct mail (you don’t say). So in short the research found that actually holding something in your hand is “a significantly more multi-sensory than marketing that appears online”.

The study concluded that “when a piece of DM was held and read by a participant, their reactions suggested that they were experiencing thought patterns similar to those the brain exhibits when processing memories and emotions. Other studies have shown that emotional processing can generate a positive response to brands and their messages, and enhanced levels of engagement. When someone engages with an emotional response through tangible material, it produces an enhanced recognition that can result in increased attention given to the brand in the future.”

This is all very interesting stuff and I agree that holding something in your hand will of course create a stronger response within the brain than looking at the same creative on your computer, but perhaps the next study should look at how we can promote the brain to pick it up and read it instead of chucking it in the bin in the first place?

Now there’s a thought.

There were reports in the press recently that a Labour leaflet campaign was targeting cancer sufferers with a message that their lives could be at risk if a Tory government was to come into power using the strap line “are the Tories a change you can afford?”

Labour claims that they used publicly available social demographic data and the data management company Experian confirmed that both Labour and the Conservatives use its Mosaic database, which divides voters into 67 groups and identifies likely cancer patients using anonymised hospital statistics, including postcodes and the diagnoses of patients.

This throws up interesting questions about what customer information a brand should use in tailoring their communications.

The holy grail of all customer marketing is surely to get to a point where brands can treat their customers as individuals but if they are seen to be taking advantage of someone’s disadvantages to promote a product or service then this risks alienating the customer and potentially turning into a PR nightmare.

As a Business Development Manager I have the advantage of being able to react to information I receive during a conversation and amend my communications accordingly.

When I am making new business calls to marketing decision makers part of my job is to identify ‘pain points’ and highlight requirements that are not currently adequately provided by their internal resources or current suppliers. This gives me a great reason for them to meet my client. However I’m always very aware that identifying pain points is one thing, but overstating them is likely to turn the prospect off.

Quite often the questions I ask are designed to raise these areas in the prospect’s mind but sometimes ‘in their mind’ is enough and these ‘problems’ remain unspoken. If, in their mind they can see a problem that is currently unsolved and match that with a potential solution that my client has expertise in then I’m more than half way there.

In my experience there is such a thing as overselling your benefits and if that is on the back of excessively highlighting a prospective client’s (or for that matter voter’s) problems then you’re bound to risk appearing mercenary or as Phyllis Delik, 80, who received one of Labours leaflets described it “callous”.

What do you think the limit should be on marketers using sensitive data to target their customers, if any?

Anthony Miller wrote a great article on the Brand Republic website on the 18th March which addressed the research done by academics at Bangor University to determine if the brain acts differently to marketing messages delivered through direct mail in comparison to those shown on screen.

From what he’s written it appears that direct mail enhances a brand’s value for a number of reasons including:

• When a piece of DM was held and read by a participant, their reactions suggested that they were experiencing thought patterns similar to those the brain exhibits when processing memories and emotions.
• It appears easier for the brain to process messages from tangible direct mail compared to digital marketing material, and subsequently easier to remember.
• When asked to keep or discard items, the physical direct mail provoked activity in the right-middle cingulate, a region of the brain that is associated with decision-making connected to emotions and social issues. Therefore the research suggests that direct mail has links to emotion-based decision-making.

Did I mention that the research was funded by Royal Mail by the way? No? Well it is.

However, cynicism aside, I thought about our own experiences between the incoming new business enquiries we generate through a result of our direct mail and email campaigns.

For the most part, our direct mail follows a very simple formula. It tends to be very short (usually no more than a few sentences) with a prompt for action at the end. And, like Marmite, people tend to either love it or hate it. But either way, most of the people who we speak to when we follow up the campaigns by phone (that is our rasion d’etre after all) have one thing in common – and that is they remember it.

I weighed up the pros and cons of the campaigns we sent by post and email and this is how they stacked up:

Email costs next to nothing to send and you can be reasonably sure that, providing you have the correct address in the first place, it is going directly to the in-box of your intended recipient. On top of this, the functionality that exists with our email marketing system allow us to see specifically who has opened it, who has clicked on a link, who has forwarded it, who has deleted without opening, etc. This gives us extremely valuable insight and allows follow-up calls to be targeted to recipients that are most likely to have an interest, even if they didn’t respond directly to the email.

Direct mail by comparison is much more expensive. Paper costs, printing costs, postage costs, the time involved in folding and stuffing, environmentally less friendly and after all that you can never be 100% sure that your intended target received it. Maybe after all the thought, time and effort that went into sending it, some vindictive PA intercepted it and binned it (no doubt a Marmite-hater) before the MD of The Jolly Nice Potential Client To Have Agency got to see it. Or maybe the postman delivered it to the wrong building, which – given the amount of post we get delivered here which is clearly marked for various other addresses – is a very real possibility. Or perhaps Royal Mail were just on strike again.

However, despite the pitfalls in the postal system, a very significant proportion of new business that we win has started with a response to a mailer. And this trend hasn’t shown any real sign of decline, despite our increasing use of email marketing in tandem with direct mail.

Now, I’m no scientist so I don’t know what part of my brain is being activated between the time it takes me to open any direct mail addressed to me and the time it takes me to throw it in the recycle bin 15 feet away from my desk. What I do know that in that time I will have glanced at it for a few seconds and those few seconds need to get the sender’s message across effectively, thus saving it from the bin. So if this applies to me, I’m sure the same rules apply to the very busy people we send Alchemis mailers to. Once you’ve opened the letter, you can’t help seeing the whole page. And if there’s not much on that page aside from one reason why it may be of benefit to you to respond, you could easily end up “accidentally” reading it even if you don’t want to.

The sheer volume of e-marketing shots I receive on the other hand may not even get a few seconds of my time. If the subject line doesn’t instantly grab my interest it’s likely to be deleted unread. If the sender is a company rather than a person, chances are I’ll assume it’s spam of some sort.

So what does the future hold for both mediums?

As far as we’re concerned we’ll continue using both direct mail and e-marketing campaigns whilst they are producing a decent return on investment, but the primary focus will always be on picking up the phone to demonstrate first hand to prospects our amazing telephone marketing skills. After all, you’ve got to practice what you preach.