Why We Need to Rethink the Digital Marketing Mantra of Right Person, Right Message, Right Time

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Consider this scenario: John Doe wakes up one morning and decides he wants a bicycle. He Googles “how to choose a bicycle,” lands on an REI article, and decides he should buy a CO-OP Cycles ARD 1.2 Bike for a little over $1,000. He looks up the closest REI with this bicycle in stock, drives to the store, and buys the bike.

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Marketers get giddy at the premise that we just need to insert ourselves at the point John decides he’s interested in a bicycle, throw some content his way, and make a sale. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!

If this is the task at hand for marketers, then we just need to know:

  • Who we need to reach

  • What they want

  • When they’re interested

    … and deliver content that will convince them to choose our brand.

Hence the familiar refrain: “Right person, right message, right time,” or some variation of this. Heck, Google is trying to tell marketers that this is the way to win. But the word RIGHT should instantly trigger critical thinkers. This type of thinking makes several assumptions of rigidity vs. the dynamic reality that actually occurs:

  • Polarity - it’s either right or wrong, there’s no in between

  • Singularity - we’re looking for one answer vs. multiple solutions

  • Stationary - things aren’t changing

The other clue for critical thinkers is that while Google can be an amazingly helpful resource, they’re still a business with the incentive to make money. The more they convince marketers that it’s just a matter of intercepting consumers at the moment desire strikes, the more important marketers see Google products like search and ads. The more Google makes money. Clever, right?

The reality is that this type of thinking can be a massive oversimplification. For one, it assumes everything happens in one fell swoop. The need arises, hit ‘em with content, and bam, you’ve got a customer! We need to recognize the many other factors that can be at play here.

Note: For the sake of this article, I’ve simplified to consider a problem to solution, but not every purchase is motivated by solving a problem, per say. As Phil Barden writes in Chapter 30 of Eat Your Greens: “We purchase brands and products to achieve the desired state, goals, needs, or Job/s To Be Done (JTBD). Motivation actually determines what we purchase.” Also, consider “content” to be any photo, video, audio, and/or text, with a variety of potential formats, from blog post, to Instagram post, to pre-roll, to a banner ad, that can be used to communicate with consumers online.

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Potential Steps Marketers Sometimes Miss

It’s easy to jump to thinking we just need to present a solution to a customer’s problem, but this is overlooking the fact that sometimes people aren’t even aware they have a problem in the first place. In an extreme example, someone who is suffering from some kind of addiction may not even realize they have a problem. Or they may be in denial. Then there’s the potential issue of correctly identifying the problem. Someone may experience lower back pain and incorrectly attribute it to their desk at work. They might buy a new office chair, get a computer stand, and a cushy wrist support. Yet they still experience lower back pain! But what if it was actually caused by wearing the wrong shoes? Sure, you could try to market to someone via the more general topic of lower back pain, but what if this person had already decided it was due to their desk at work? They may have started out by searching for “good office chairs for lower back pain,” and “computer stand for ergonomics,” and not be interested in content about shoes, even if it is relevant to lower back pain.

Not Everything Happens Online

This leads to another assumption marketers sometimes make: thinking people live their entire lives through the screen. It’s very possible that someone may get information and/or be influenced outside of digital. In the example of the person who is looking for solutions to lower back pain, they may have talked to a coworker who shared a similar experience, or shared their troubles with friends and family to get advice. In this case, a critical step in the process may take place offline, outside the grasp of search engine marketers and programmatic media buys. Or, someone may be watching TV and see a pair of red sneakers they have to have. By the time they go online to search for them, they’ve already decided the exact pair they want. Or someone sees their yoga instructor wearing a pair of leggings they love the design of, and they buy them right then and there in the yoga studio. This is just one of my potential scenarios in which marketers may not be able to reach consumers for influential moments.

You Might Not Even Have Time to Intercept People Before They Buy

The time someone spends on any of these purchase steps can vary greatly, depending on a variety of factors. For example, the problem/desire/need can happen without much thought, at incredible speed. Someone may go from the desire for something sweet to buying a candy bar in a matter of seconds. In these types of purchases, there may be no opportunity to intercept someone to convince them of what to buy. When a person grabs a Milky Way bar at the grocery store checkout, they’re likely relying on existing memory structures and System 1 thinking. They were already primed before they got to the point-of-purchase. Is there a “right time” to build memory structures for a candy brand?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, someone may spend considerable time at each stage, carefully researching and mulling things over. For example, in scenarios such as higher education, buying a house, or deciding to get a knee replacement, someone may spend weeks, months, or years before they make a decision. In these scenarios, there’s a lot of potential to connect with the consumer and provide resources.

But this still doesn’t mean you can assume that these types of purchases necessitate longer, drawn out purchase processes, or that people are interested in content from your brand at every step along the way. For example, while some people may spend considerable time researching graduate degree programs before they make a selection, others may have had their heart set on a particular program since a young age. If you’ve been dreaming of going to law school at Harvard since you were a kid, you may skip straight to choosing your school, without considering alternatives.

Potential Roadblocks

Real life is messy and imperfect. People can easily get stuck at various stages of the process… and they might not even know it.

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There are so many things that may prevent someone from recognizing a problem, correctly identifying it, and/or finding solutions and choosing one. People are busy! They don’t always have time to research a product/service or even think about one (which is why a lot of purchases are made with the mindset of “good enough”). Sometimes people are in denial that they have a problem at all. Sometimes, they just don’t care. Sure, you could buy these baggies to keep your produce fresher, longer (supposedly), but do you really care that much? Then there are the competing priorities. If you’re busy planning a wedding, buying baggies to keep produce longer is probably not the most urgent thing on your mind. Heck, you could just be busy reading a good book, busy attending school, or busy with your hobby of building model airplanes. Believe it or not, people have lives outside of buying things! Then we have accessibility issues. Maybe someone doesn’t have access to a foot specialist in their small, rural town, to get help from someone in-person (their preferred way of getting help for healthcare issues). Maybe someone doesn’t live near one of those Dr. Scholl’s machines that you step on to make custom orthotics for your feet, so even if they really wanted them, they can’t get them. Then there’s the thorny problem that we often forget about: you don’t know what you don’t know. Ignorance may or may not be bliss, but it is likely to be a neutral state from which you’re not looking for a product/service. All in all, there are all sorts of reasons why someone may not be interested, ready to buy, or even care.

Let’s Talk About Apathy

Apathy, AKA people not giving a sh**, is one of the biggest problems for marketers, because it’s unlikely they will tune in to your marketing message at all. They just don’t care. Yes, even if you intercept them and yell in their face with how good your product is, they can still ignore you. Humans are surprisingly resilient creatures. Instead of continuing to ramrod your message down people’s throats, many marketers take a different approach: try to get people to want to pay attention. Revolutionary, I know, but it is possible to deliver marketing people enjoy. But this is no walk in the park, either. It turns out, entertaining people isn’t necessarily easy! Think about it, there’s a whole entertainment industry, where tons of people work everyday on material for the sole purpose of entertainment, and it often doesn’t deliver. Every year, movies fail at the box office, TV shows get cancelled, and videos fall in the forest of YouTube without anyone noticing. So to ask marketers to both entertain and sell? Of course that isn’t easy.

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What About Online Ads and Retargeting?

Let’s go back to the original scenario, where John Doe wakes up and searches for a bike, then goes out and buys it. One thing marketers have done, which in some ways, acts as a sort of catchall solution to the many different challenges presented here, is to make sure John Doe never goes another day online without seeing that bike. Everywhere John Doe goes online, he sees retargeting ads for the bike. This can work, to some degree, because it’s (a) helping the bike stays top-of-mind (b) reminding John about this particular brand of bike (c) giving John an easy route back to purchase (d) ready for John when he is. However, it doesn’t solve some of the problems discussed above, like the potential roadblocks of John not living near an REI, not having the time to go check out the bikes, or just plain not caring because he’s too busy playing Fortnite. And abysmal CTRs suggest that online ads are, despite all the fanfare, not always effective at getting people to your website:

These numbers aren’t specific to retargeting, which may perform better. And you may be ready to tell me how your brand is so much better than the averages. Good for you! The problem is, even if you were to be doubly better than the average, your display ad CTR would still be .10%, which means that 99.90% of the time your ad isn’t clicked. Ouch. You could say that banner ads help build memory through reminders, even if they don’t get clicked on, but then you’d have to contend with the very real issue of banner blindness, which basically means people are trained to ignore online ads (and anything that looks like them).

Closing Thoughts (For Now)

None of this is easy, otherwise marketers wouldn’t have jobs. The main takeaway is that reducing digital marketing to a matter of right person, right time, right message is a nice jingle, but it’s not necessarily helpful in practice, or practical to implement. Here are some things to consider:

  • Think about the full scope of the purchase process, before someone even realizes they have a problem/desire/Job to Be Done (JTBD), and the various phases along the way

  • Consider potential roadblocks and reasons why someone may not even be thinking about your product/service as a solution, may think your product/solution is wrong, and/or be in a mindset where they’re not open to your message, and how you might overcome that

  • Remember that even though digital is a huge part of most people’s lives, people live a lot of their lives offline, and can be influenced by many different non-trackable touch points

  • Humans are very good at ignoring marketers, and sometimes you need to reach people with entertainment because otherwise they just don’t give a hoot and won’t hear your message at all (but this is not easy either)

  • Consider the role of online ads before you attempt to blanket your audience in programmatic media

Reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right message isn’t necessarily wrong. But it also seems misleadingly simple. The question isn’t whether or not this is the right way to think about it, but whether or not it’s useful.

P.S. Check out the Marketoonist for his post with humorous cartoons about the potential pitfalls of right person, right time, right message.

What do you think? Is there anything I missed here? Do you agree? Disagree? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!