Engage This!

The ongoing battle to define engagement continues in a recent article by Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer of Cymfony, the media measurement firm. It’s funny that, as marketers, we strive to effectively measure engagement, even as the industry still struggles to define it.

In the article published on iMedia Connection, Nail discusses the active debate that took place at the Advertising Week conference. Rather than leaving it up in the air — which BrandingVoodoo has experienced in more than one recent Webinar — Nail actually commits to a definition and goes a step beyond by delving into the psychological process behind engagement.

Stay with us.

“The heart of engagement is ‘turning on’ a mind,” said Joe Plummer, the chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), at the conference.

This corroborates Nail’s claim that engagement’s official definition is “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.”

One of the article’s more interesting points came from Harvard University’s Gerald Zaltman, who says that as consumers “engage” in subconscious processing, they create associations, symbols, metaphors and other experiences into ad messaging to give it personal relevance. That’s deep.

Not to downplay Plummer’s assertion that the AIDA model of advertising (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) “is wrong.” Whoa, he is not scared.

In addition to turning the Think, Feel, Do process on its head, Plummer claims the seduction of the consumer is more powerful than touting a product’s features and benefits, saying, “storytelling is more powerful than argumentation.”

In a nice summation from the above conclusions around consumer engagement, Nail takes on a more existential mindset when defining specific types of engagement:

• Media engagement provides a context that can facilitate consumer engagement

• Ad engagement draws the consumer in to create personalized meaning

• Engagement marketing reactivates associations at a time when the consumer is ready to move from the emotional engagement to an active form

• Brand engagement results when individual ads, messages and experiences blend into a whole that drives preference, word-of-mouth recommendations and other loyalty behaviors

BrandingVoodoo certainly think that was worth a read. What do you think?