Rommil Santiago: eCommerce, Marketing & Management

Raising awareness is never enough

It never fails. Every quarter, I’ll hear someone say that the goal of a marketing campaign is to raise awareness about a product/cause/event. Yes, raising awareness is indeed a worthy objective. But is it truly ever a goal? For instance, if you were to ask me if I was aware of the Chevy Cobalt, I’d say of course. But if you were then to ask me if I’d ever test drive one, I’d say no and that, in fact, I don’t really know what one looks like other than it’s probably blue-ish. I truly doubt that my awareness of the Cobalt brand and complete indifference to its existence was the marketer’s aim.

I would go so far as to say that while awareness is definitely a prerequisite for virtually every marketing campaign, if ever a client were to present you with a marketing plan for which awareness was the ultimate goal, you should brace yourself for a long and challenging engagement - for not only have they not thought out the entire communications process, they probably haven’t thought about how to measure the campaign’s success. And if a client isn’t sure what constitutes a successful campaign, there’s no guarantee that he or she will appreciate what an awesome job you’ve done. (Though one could argue that you could get away by doing a lousy job in that case - but let’s steer away from that sort of practice, okay?)

Awareness isn’t actionable

In the end, every marketer wants to influence his or her target market towards some sort of action. Be it a purchase, a lifestyle change, or information sharing, marketers are aiming to get you to do something. Without getting too bogged down in theory, when you plan a communications campaign, you’re looking to:


  1. Have the target market learn and think about your offer

  2. Affect your target market’s feelings about your offer

  3. Encourage your target market to act on your offer


In the world of academia, these can be broken down into the micro-goals of the “communications effects pyramid” but I find that, in practice, the three levels I’ve listed are enough and can be applied to virtually every campaign. What’s important to note here is that the ultimate goal is to have your target market act on your offer and that the only way to do this is to affect them on a cognitive and on an emotional level. From a neuro-marketing perspective, this makes a great deal of sense.

Emotions make advertising sticky

Neuroscience tells us that without emotion, we can’t properly learn anything. Essentially if the part of your brain that modulates emotion becomes damaged in some way, regardless of whether your cognitive abilities remained intact, you would have a hard time distinguishing right from wrong, pleasant from unpleasant, etc. This is why commercials that are able to strike an emotional chord with its viewers are so effective. For example, using humour to encode the memory of a certain brand of candy often works to make people associate joy with a product. Similarly, encoding the memory of an athletic shoe with the feeling of motivation works. The idea here is: emotions act as the glue for your marketing message.

So the next time you are faced with the task of designing an integrated marketing communications plan, put the raising awareness objectives to the side. Sure they’re important, but they are almost never your end goal.