As Outkast Teaches, Marketing Should Drive Action

Editor's note: This is part of Marcus Collins' Check the Rhyme series, in which he extracts marketing insights from rap lyrics and explores the influence of hip-hop on the marketing world. Hip-hop provides a master class on how we can consider and frame our marketing activity—take André 3000's verse on Outkast's 1996 classic “Elevators (Me and You)” where he raps, “If it don’t move your feet, then I don’t eat.” In just 10 words, André 3000 encapsulates the core function of marketing, with implications for how we should design and measure its success. Let’s unpack the lyric a bit further. Since its origins, marketing has been associated with creating new products. In fact, my colleague and closest thought partner, University of Michigan professor John Branch, actually defines marketing as the act of “going to market”—bringing products, ideas and content to the public. This is where André 3000’s verse unlocks perspective. We go to the people to get them to move: buy, vote, recycle, wear a mask, watch or evangelize. Or in some cases, we use marketing communication to get people not to move. Everything we do as marketers is in service of getting people to take action—and if we don’t move their feet, then we and our clients don’t eat. Through this frame, the implication for measuring marketing activity becomes evident. If the job of marketing is to influence behavior, then we should be measuring behavioral adoption, not consideration or brand love, as an indicator of success. Consideration, after all, is a cognition, not a behavior, and we all know the Inception-like level of complexity that’s needed to measure thoughts—unless you have an fMRI machine in your basement, it’s quite difficult to quantitatively assess what people are thinking. On top of looking for the right thing to measure, we then tend to spend an outsized amount of energy debating the measurement tool as opposed to the findings themselves. Not very helpful. Measuring behavior simplifies the process by underscoring the reason we go to market in the first place, our objective as it were: to get people to move. What Jim Morrison Can Teach Brands About Business Success What does this mean for marketers? Before we start a campaign, we must first define our marketing objectives. Duh! I know. But defining objectives should be a process of concretely identifying what behaviors we want people to adopt. Yes, we want people to buy. But if no one knows about your new product, then perhaps you want people to check out the website to learn more about the offering first. Whatever it is, be it website visits or product evangelism, our marketing objective should be behavioral in nature. Once we clearly define the behavioral marketing objective(s), we should design marketing activities that will catalyze the desired behavior. That is to say, the advertising, the content, the partnerships and all the many creative stimuli that are birthed by the brilliant minds of our industry should be conceived with the intention of getting people to move—full stop. Take for instance the recent success of Coinbase’s Super Bowl commercial. I imagine the brief might have been something along the lines of, “We want people to download the app,” considering that would be the equivalent of getting on first base with would-be crypto consumers. The thinking might have been, “If we can get people to download the app, they’d be one step closer to actually engaging in cryptocurrency." Downloads were most likely due to social proof—others using their phone to scan the QR code—or closing a gap in knowledge—a psychological phenomenon George Loewenstein describes as cognitive deprivation, arising from a want to understand the unknown. Reengineering the brief would lead me to believe Coinbase leveraged what they knew about human behavior, be it intuitively or purposefully, and used the context media moment of the Super Bowl to get people to download the app. And boy did they download the app. Reportedly, over 20 million people visited the site in a single minute and shot the Coinbase app up from #186 in the Apple App Store to #2 literally overnight. Whether it was worth the capital spent for the airtime is another story, but this example underscores that the best marketing activities are those designed to get people to adopt behavior. Remember, if people don’t move, then we don’t win. This ultimately requires an understanding of what actually gets people to move. Scholars across the social sciences, like Loewenstein's behavioral economics, have invested innumerable hours amassing theories that best describe why we do what we do. The better we understand these theories, the more likely we are to influence behavioral adoption. This is, after all, the core function of marketing. Through the frame André 3000 provides us, not only will we likely have more success with our marketing endeavors, but we might also have greater predictability of the outcomes because of our greater understanding of people. The best work of my career in this industry has been a byproduct of my investment in understanding people—I'd go so far as to say it's the biggest cheat code there is for marketers. That assumes, of course, that you want to “eat.” Otherwise, we’re just making Fabergé eggs—beautiful works of art that are to be admired, not to catalyze behavior. We Must Redefine—and Deepen Our Sense of—Culture

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As Outkast Teaches, Marketing Should Drive Action

In just 10 words, André 3000 gets distracted marketers back on track

Marcus Collins

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Marcus Collins