Post-Production of Meaning: Measuring How Consumers Change Your Messaging/Association

Authors: Chasson Gracie & Marcel Salas

Introduction

Before any form of advertisement goes in market, it is a brand’s goal is to ensure that it will succeed in engaging a target consumer group in an impactful and memorable way. But while it is convenient to rest on the notion that an advertising message, or a feeling that an ad is trying to evoke, will be received in the exact manner that it is desired, the reality is that its intended meaning/feelings in many cases will be transformed or challenged in one way or another by consumers once they have been exposed. Although pre-market testing guides a brand with important tools to preemptively measure audience reception of branded content, the truth of the matter is that advertisements take on a life of their own once they are released. So, what is a brand to do? All is not lost, and we explore in this blog post how people transform and challenge messaging/intended feelings, along with post-survey techniques one can use to help brands better determine whether meaning has changed, and how to address that in real-time.

Production of Meaning

As advertising media, online and offline, becomes even more woven into consumers’ lives, we should turn our attention towards understanding the ways in which audiences actively produce meaning from advertisements once it is made a part of their cultural world. This idea rests on the premise that every act of media consumption is an act of production by the consumer- the production of meaning. Consumers are an integral element in the modern ad-making process, not solely as receivers of the messages being communicated to them, but as active participants in creating the meaning of the advertisement itself.

Culture — What Do We Mean?

Culture is the lens through which each and every person views the world. As the defining force of humankind, culture is an active process by which human beings supply the world with meaning. Culture is materialized in the form of practices, habits, belief systems, frames of thought, and objects we use everyday. These products of culture, and what they mean to us, are always in flux and shift between people and contexts, providing each one of us with a distinct outlook on life, and they influence how we internalize advertisements.

Since the beginning of time, humans have been placing cultural significance onto material and intangible objects by extending their meaning beyond utilitarian value and into something far more deep and emotionally significant. We call this the meaning-transfer process, and in our marketing context, ads are the “raw materials” that consumers internalize in order to develop their understanding of a brand and its personal significance to them.

While the goal of an ad is to build a brand and to help people make mental shortcuts when they need to make purchase decisions, the ad itself is only one piece of the puzzle. Consumers are the final creative directors in the ad making process. They are integral authors in the transfer of meaning among a piece of content, a brand, and the real world (McCracken 75).

Consumer Hijacking of Meaning

With the rise of digital channels and social media, a new layer of engagement has been added to this routine conversation between ad and consumer, making it even more interactive, and in some instances, reactive. Now more than ever before, consumers have the ability to share their personal readings of ads directly with brands and other consumers in real-time. With the stroke of a key, consumers’ voices have become more influential than ever. They are empowered with the tools to remix content into memes, hijack hashtags, and share their viewpoints in the form of comments, likes, shares, retweets and reblogs. And Mark Ronson educated the world in his TED Talk how the remix is the main way in which art and ideas are produced in contemporary society.

Hashtag hijacking is one of many examples of how today’s consumers are actively changing the meaning of ads using digital channels. While a hashtag is not directly a piece of visual content, it is a conversation starter for brands and consumers to use that are akin to digital “campfires” of sorts. While hashtags are usually great tools to engage customers, they can also work against a brand if not executed with the meaning transfer process in mind. Hashtag hijacking occurs when consumers use a hashtag for a different purpose than the one the brand originally intended. These days, a hashtag can turn into a “bashtag” in the blink of an eye.

As you may recall, McDonalds learned this lesson the hard way. They launched the Twitter hashtag “#McDstories” in hopes that it would inspire consumers to share fond memories about eating at the fastfood chain, thus creating a domino effect based upon positive emotional experiences that would enhance its brand image. Unfortunately for the brand, it spurred a wave of combative tweets with thousands of consumers sharing their “#McDHorror Stories.” Within just an hour of promoting the hashtag, McDonalds was forced to pull it, while the new bashtag continued to grow. The conversation McDonalds intended to cultivate with consumers did not go as planned because someone failed to consider how those opposed to their brand would change the meaning of the hashtag to spark an oppositional conversation.

The meaning-transfer process between consumers and ads is ever the more apparent, which brings forth a new reality for both brands and marketers to negotiate. While the direction of a campaign can be rerouted more rapidly than previous times, this new reality also presents a beneficial opportunity for marketers and brands to create real-time strategies for engaging consumer opinions, ideas, and interpretations of ads.

Using Research to Measure Messaging/Feeling Hijacks and Reacting

With an increase in the post production of meaning by consumers, it requires a newer way to use research to measure this. We believe when possible in the concepting phase to utilize visual semiotics in testing to harness the power of consumer perspectives, along with being able to determine potential watchout signs early on. But, once an ad campaign is live, there still needs to be extra steps to protect the intended meaning, and what we do to ensure this includes:

1 Measuring intended messaging/feeling vs comprehended feeling/message via online conversation analysis

2 Measuring emotions: Using text analytics of online conversation to determine overall emotion (happy, sad, frustrated, etc.,), thus going beyond sentiment (is it positive? Is it negative?)

3 Determining the contextual impact of feeling/messaging during key media vehicles (giving you the opportunity to reconfigure media plans)

4 Identify of influencers: Determining those, and their networks, who are having the most impact on changing the meaning of your campaign

5 Recreation of segmentation (if applicable): In some cases, it is possible to recreate your survey-based segmentation within the social media/online world, thus helping us get even more granular in understand how feeling/messaging may be changing based upon group

6 Increases/decrease in share of conversation and whether it is due to positive or negative emotional reasons

and more…

Conclusion

We know consumers have the final word in the production of an advertisement’s meaning. But, we also know that social media, blogs and forums amplify the voices of consumers and their interpretation of content — but we can identify, strategize and correct for this with the research and insights techniques mentioned above when it goes astray.

Today a brand more than ever needs a contemporary brand tracking system, one that picks up on hijacking and changing of meaning quickly, and gives a brand an opportunity to react fairly quickly. There many lessons we can learn by placing ads within the cultural world. With this understanding, we incorporate culture, visual semiotics and social media analytical techniques that measure change in meaning/feeling of an ad campaign, give strategic guidance on how to impact that change in a positive way, and measure the post results of the change, aiding you in enhancing your marketing plan quickly, wisely and creatively.

Reference

McCracken, Grant. “Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods.” Portland State University School of Business. Last modified December, 1985.

http://www.sba.pdx.edu/faculty/ahutinel/Read/2.pdf

Douglas, Mary and Isherwood, Baron. “World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption.” London: Allen Lane, 1979.

http://www.amazon.com/World-Goods-Towards-Anthropology-Consumption/dp/0713911638