Digital First (Or Bust)

Some psychological reasons why businesses are slow to adopt digital marketing as humans

The Skinny

During the spring of my junior and senior years of high school, I worked for our local Quiznos Sub Sandwich Shop. While a sandwich artist for Quiznos, I was extremely interested in helping them with their Facebook marketing. I told my bosses that I had an interest in it and, sure enough, they let me be their “marketing assistant.” Though this meant I could post on Facebook whenever I wanted, it also meant I had to work on other, less exciting projects for marketing. One of these was cutting out and distributing coupons to all of the local businesses to hand out to their patrons. I went door to door and handed out hundreds of $5.00 turkey-bacon-guac sandwiches coupons, and for a little while, we saw an uptick in business. Unfortunately, less than a year later, the owner of that franchise shut its doors, got a divorce, and became a manager at WalMart.

There were a lot of reasons for that Quiznos franchise to close. As a corporation, there were a lot of issues, but on a basic level, that little Quiznos in La Grande, Oregon could have easily staved off the shutdown of their little shop by recognizing they could have taken advantage of the digital landscape. Had the owners of the Quiznos I worked at looked around at all of the digital options for marketing, like some Facebook ads or Google Adwords, I can’t help but wonder if things would have turned around for them in their perfect spot just off I-84.

The Fat

Ever since then, I have felt one thing to be right about the business landscape. No matter if you have a business that is 50 years old, or in the startup stages, you have to move to the digital-first marketing if your business is going to thrive in the long term.

One thing that holds back a lot of managers and executives in many decisions is the salience bias. The salience bias is the tendency to focus on the most easily recognizable features of a concept, and in the world of marketing, it is dominating the much-needed transition to digital-first marketing efforts.

If you catch yourself or your team ever latching on the first idea in a meeting or brainstorming exercise, stop them dead in their tracks and acknowledge the lack of options you have or have not considered. The most available and readily accessible option is often the easiest, but not usually the most effective. Particularly in a digital age where the possibilities of marketing in the digital age are nearly endless. Should you do email marketing? Facebook advertising? A content marketing initiative on YouTube? Who knows. The one thing that you must recognize is the need to consider multiple options.

Additionally, if you ever get to the point in a meeting where you are justifying a marketing action by saying, “we need to do that because it’s the way it has always been done,” take a close look at the relevance of those actions and their effectiveness. The relevancy of those actions also must not only today but long into the future. Placing a higher value on something that you have always been doing is the endowment effect. Quiznos could easily have paid the $100 to promote a Quiznos sale on Facebook and reached hundreds more than the couple blocks my legs could carry me.

Morale of the story, it is important to logically weigh out the decisions in your business based on Return on Investment and long-term effectiveness. Fight the salience bias, the endowment bias, and others, and you just may make it in the digital marketing age.