The message hierarchy
The essential tennis balls of marketing
Truth be told, tennis has never been my thing (largely because my attempts to serve could only ever be described as laughable) – but during my career I’ve always found an analogy about tennis balls to be profoundly useful.
Many years ago a very wise strategic planner gave me a brilliant bit of advice that I’ve employed relentlessly ever since.
‘Tell clients about the tennis ball test’.
In flowery academic language I guess you could call it ‘establishing the optimum communication hierarchy’, but in plain English it might be easier to think of it as ‘a way of helping people understand what you’re actually trying to say’.
The test is simple
Imagine this scenario.
You have two people (A and B) facing each other in a room. Imagine A had four or five tennis balls in their hands. If A threw them all to B at the same time how many do you think B would catch?
Probably none.
And B would certainly be forgiven for wondering why they had been thrown them all at once. B might even be slightly annoyed with A, ‘Did A actually think I’d catch any of them?’ Maybe A is just an idiot.
But what if A told B ‘I’m going to throw you just one of these tennis balls’. Do you think B would catch it?
I tend to think so.
The clever bit
The more enlightened amongst you might have already realized that A is a crude metaphor for a brand, and B is its audience. And of course the tennis balls are the brand messages.
With any product or service there is lots of information a brand is eager to share. The trouble is that brands sometimes panic and decide to ‘throw’ all of these titbits to the audience in the misguided belief that the audience will be able (or even be bothered) to sift through this information carefully, decide what is most important to them (and what is peripheral), suddenly have an epiphany, and fall desperately in love with the brand.
Now I’ve always thought it very important to treat audiences with respect (they are invariably intelligent people), but I’ve never been an advocate of making them do all the work. That approach is more likely to provoke confusion and/or indifference.
Much better to just give them the tools with which to make a rational fact-based buying decision.
And as for falling ‘in love’ with a brand, well, that’s just a bit of self-satisfying over-sell isn’t it.
In the real world people have preferences for certain brands in certain circumstances, but rarely eulogize one at the exclusion of all others. If you go to the supermarket to buy some AA batteries for your radio are you really going to home empty-handed if they’ve run out of Duracell ones? No of course not, you might let out a private sigh of faint frustration, but you’d just buy some other AA batteries (and they’d probably be cheaper too). You wouldn’t start getting punchy.
All a brand could/should aim to do is to try and ensure that its marketing messaging helps make its product/service a distinct and credible candidate for someone’s business.
So which is your most important tennis ball?
It’s always been critical to establish which is the most important bit of information.
Which insight-based message is going to have the greatest impact? Which fresh approach to their issues is going to challenge and/or change their perception and/or knowledge and put them in the frame of mind to perhaps behave as you might hope?
To have any chance of doing this you’ll need to genuinely understand your audience, appreciating their world and what really influences their decision-making processes.
Furthermore you need to communicate your ‘hero’ message (tennis ball) in the most compelling fashion – and that invariably means it has to be relevant, presented in a recognizable context, and ensure that your killer benefit is easy to grasp.
Remember you’re throwing them nice soft tennis balls, not rock hard bowling balls. Be kind with your information, give them something they’d be happy to catch.
There’s something else too, your messaging needs to address a legitimate ‘communication disconnect’ – the difference between what your audience thinks now, and what you’d like them to think in the future. They’ll be really impressed by that – if you can pull it off.
And of course whatever you say needs to be absolutely true.
That bit is non-negotiable, obviously.
Don’t disregard the other tennis balls
Just throw them to B as and when they are ready to catch them. Or let them know they can come and take them off of you as and when they want to (I know, I’m really stretching this analogy to breaking point!).
It’s a question of establishing a hierarchy and offering support information in a calm, measured fashion – through whatever medium is most appropriate (body copy, on your website, through social media, etc.).
Put yourself in the audiences’ shoes, let them feel in control of the interaction and always think about the authentic User Experience (UX – seemingly topical, yet something every marketer in history should have always been thinking about, regardless of the medium).
Ask yourself this: once they’ve got the killer message, what else do they need to know in order to convert them?
A fundamental understanding and application of the tennis ball principle can truly enhance your marketing activity – and possibly make you a bit of a star around the office.