3.
The Context Framework
Breaking Through the Noise
Back in the limited media era, marketing meant airing a car commercial during an evening TV sitcom. Everyone watching the sitcom would see the ad, but only a fraction of those viewers may be interested in buying a new car. Such advertising still appears today, of course, but as we learned in part one, it isn’t very effective in the infinite media era. Why? Because a car ad flashed on a screen while someone’s trying to unwind in front of a favorite TV show isn’t contextual. That is, it isn’t relevant to what the consumer is doing at that moment in time, and most likely it isn’t welcome either. So people exercise the infinite choices they have and simply record their favorite show to watch later (if it’s not already on Netflix or Hulu or the like)—and then fast-forward through the commercials.
As we saw in part one, context marketing breaks through where traditional marketing can’t: it meets consumers where they are (rather than trying to attract their attention) by fulfilling their expectations in a particular moment. But it also creates a series of connected moments that incrementally guide customers toward the next step in their particular customer journey. Remember the ways we saw how Tesla does exactly that—versus what the car ad airing during a sitcom accomplishes.
To review, context marketing motivates customers by recasting our definition of who the players are (the role of marketing), how we market (the execution of marketing), and what we do (the scope of marketing). Over the next five chapters of part two, we’ll examine that what: the context. This notion of context is the heart of the context marketing revolution.
To help you and your brand adopt this new idea of marketing—and become a high-performing organization—I created a framework for achieving and measuring the potential context of a moment. Specifically, to meet customers in their context, marketers need to foster customer experiences that are (1) available, (2) permissioned, (3) personal, (4) authentic, and (5) purposeful.
We will look at that framework momentarily, but first let’s understand that breaking through the noise and meeting consumers where they are is only the beginning. Rather, it’s the cycle of context that allows us to build reliable and sustainable pathways that connect our brand with our audience members throughout their journey.
The Context Cycle
One of the biggest differences between our current and past eras is the idea of memory. Not our personal memory, but rather the environment’s memory. Limited media had no memory. It didn’t know if you read last month’s issue of a newsletter. Infinite media does. That’s the memory that gets tapped to determine context. Each experience and associated experiences are tracked by AI, which is simultaneously listening to consumers’ engagement to determine future outcomes. In this way, context is a cycle. Where context breeds engagement, the engagement signaling greater context increases its future reach.
In this compounding effect, a brand, its audience, and the experiences they create together continually achieve greater context and more reliable reach. Over time, those three parts working together do more than just elevate a single moment. They raise the likelihood that future experiences—like the next Google search, email, or social post—will break through as well. To understand how the cycle works, we need to start with understanding how the AI that’s present in all our devices and programs operates.
The AI is always looking for ways to serve up contextual experiences to the user. To determine context, it looks at a wide range of factors, such as who created the experience and what the topic is. Also, who is the user who’s engaging with it? A mom? A business owner? Has the individual engaged with similar experiences? Have people similar to the individual engaged with those experiences? The more of such factors AI can identify between the individual and the experience, the greater the context, and the more likely it is to break through. Note that this data is tracked and recorded and referenced continuously, with each engagement added to the ledger, which alters future outcomes.
This cycle is not new; it has always been in play for web pages and search engine optimization. Breaking through in a Google search results page is a combination of topical relevance and how engaging the experience was. Did people click through, visit the site, and then instantly leave? Or did they spend ten minutes on the site looking at multiple pages? And breaking through means engagement with not just the site’s content but also the backlinks, shares, likes, comments, time on page, and more. These signals are the compounding factors that ensure our brand experiences are more readily found along a person’s journey. Again, they also ensure that all similar experiences are more likely to be seen, not just that one. In other words, past engagement suggests to the AI that there will be future engagement—and the cycle continues.
All modern media now follows this same model. Social posts are exposed to more people as more people engage with them. Email filters begin to notice if you open and engage with emails from a particular person or vendor, moving them and placing them in the “important” tab. It’s a cycle of context that’s driven by engagement.
Consumer engagement is a very strong compounding factor, but that is not where the cycle starts—only what keeps it going. The cycle starts by creating experiences that consumers want to engage with. It starts with the five elements of context, and those elements are compounding too. I will dive into each element later in this section, but first let me show you a simple example of how they work together.
Two of the five elements are available and permissioned. Both are great things on their own, but when combined they have greater power. An available experience exists and can be served up, but if you have permission from the individual to access personal data, you can leverage that information to enhance the experience, compounding the context of the moment by making it more personal. In this same way, each of the five elements compounds to create greater context.
The reliability of context marketing comes from that compounding nature. The more context you create, the more engagement you drive. The more engagement you drive, the more likely that the experience, and others, will break through. With a strong foundation of why we need to focus on context, and how context cycles work to reliably deliver our experiences, let’s look at the individual elements of the context framework.
The Context Framework
The framework of the five elements of context—brand experiences that are available, permissioned, personal, authentic, and purposeful—allows you to meet your audience in ever-greater context (see figure 3-1). That is, the more of these elements your brand experience incorporates and combines, the more contextual it will be.
Before I walk you through the framework elements, let’s take a quick look at how the framework functions. It is best to view each of the elements as a mini continuum, from least to most contextual. The point where the axis connects to the center of the framework is least contextual. For example, on the permissioned element, the center represents no permission, while the outer edge would be explicit permission. Think of the continuum as a guide to help you see ways you can increase the context of any moment by either moving further out on any one element or adding others.
You can also use the framework to evaluate an experience. By working through each of the elements and marking where on each continuum your experience falls, you will be able to better see why the experience was lackluster and how to improve it. When plotting an experience, the more contextual an experience, the larger the web will be.
As you can see in figure 3-2, the most contextual experiences make a complete web, as in the diagram on the far right.
The context framework
Now let’s take a brief look at each of the elements, which we’ll explore in depth in the five chapters that follow.
Element 1: Available
An experience cannot break through to anyone unless it’s available. Traditional marketing uses a forced approach to make brand experiences available to the largest number of people possible, and the more captive the audience, the better. Context marketing couldn’t be more the opposite: its ultimate goal is to help people accomplish their task at hand or achieve the value they seek in the moment. Rather than reach masses, context marketing aims to make a single, human-to-human connection at the most opportune moment.
In my framework, available focuses on the delivery method you choose for your brand experience. Do you force it on to people, or do they find it on their own? How the experience is delivered often determines how trusted it is and how likely it is to drive action. At the lowest end of the available continuum are forced experiences—magazine ads, billboards, pop-up ads. Next are direct experiences, which can range from email to social media engagements. The apex of organic experiences are found by the individual in his or her own time.
Plotting an experience with the context framework
Element 2: Permissioned
As we discussed in part one, people more readily engage with things they have asked for (permissioned) over things they have not. Much of the interaction that will help your brand and content appear in social feeds and open up direct communication channels. Permission comes in two main forms: implicit and explicit. Implicit permission results when an individual contacts your brand first, such as when the customer has abandoned items on your site’s shopping cart and you follow up with a retargeting ad. Permission is implicit here because, wittingly or not, the consumer has given you the information you need to engage with him or her.
Explicit permission involves a defined action taken by a consumer that says, “Yes, I want to be in contact with your brand,” such as following, friending, or subscribing. Explicit permission gives your brand access to personal data and a range of new, direct delivery options.
Once your brand has opened a permissioned path, whether implicit or explicit, the context your brand can achieve increases substantially. Chapter 5 focuses on how to gain permission on various channels and how that permission lays the groundwork for becoming more personal, the next element in our framework.
Element 3: Personal
The personal element encompasses every effort you make to tailor your brand experience to an individual person. Obviously, access to personal data allows your brand experience to be the most personalized, but the personal element goes beyond how personalized you can make an experience to how personally you can deliver it.
Here we begin to see how direct delivery (see the available element), enabled by the permissioned element, opens the door for brands to go past simple one-to-one marketing and reach the apex of context: human-to-human. This new frontier of marketing enlists your employees, fans, and brand advocates to become a platoon of brand extenders, who build brand relationships in new and distributed ways. In part three we will look at the technology used to scale personal efforts and compound the effects of the first three elements of available, permissioned, and personal.
Element 4: Authentic
Authentic, a popular word these days in plenty of disciplines, generally means that something is genuine or original. The underlying judgment of whether something is an authentic experience often boils down to satisfying an expectation: Is the experience using the right voice? Is it empathic with its audience? Are consumers seeing a brand experience congruent with the media channel they are using (what they expect to see)? To meet the demands of the authentic element, your brand experience must deliver on all three measures.
This is harder than it sounds. The infinite era has new and constantly changing media and mediums, and we cannot look to the past as a guide for using them. Creating authentic brand experiences thus challenges us to leverage voice, empathy, and channel consistency to meet the consumer expectations associated with our ever-changing media landscape. All of this makes authentic the most subjective element of the five: what is authentic in your eyes might not be viewed that way by all of your audiences. Also, just because an experience appears authentic does not guarantee it will break through, which makes it difficult in retrospect to determine whether the experience was considered authentic. Nevertheless, authenticity is often what separates success from failure in your brand experience, even when the three previous elements have been achieved at their most contextual. Authentic also demands a shift away from rigid brand guidelines and approved language toward an adaptable, often on the fly, conversational approach that will provide audiences with brand experiences they will delight in discovering.
Element 5: Purposeful
The first four elements of context help us understand what it takes to deliver an experience (make it available) the individual wants to have (it must be permissioned), delivered by another human (be sure it’s personal), in a way that meets expectations (it must be authentic). However, the individual buyer still has to engage, repeatedly, to keep the pathway open and to progress to the final stages of the customer journey as described in chapter 2, such as becoming an advocate for your brand. Quite a TALL order. That’s where the fifth element of context, purposeful, comes in to grease the joints by naturally motivating significant, even physical, audience engagement.
Purposeful brand experiences range from corporate social responsibility (which basically makes people feel better about you as a brand) to a brand-defining purpose that thematically guides all campaigns to coaction: when your brand and individuals in your audience participate in a brand experience together. Purposeful experiences allow the brand to converse on topics beyond the product or service it offers, which creates deeper, more contextual customer relationships.
For example, the company GoPro makes cameras, yet rarely ever talks about cameras in its marketing. Instead, it focuses on the thrill of adventure, a purpose it shares with its audience by posting an audience member’s (read: customer’s) “Photo of the Day” every day. By employing the purposeful element, GoPro has amassed fourteen million followers on Instagram, which is almost ten times the combined audiences of the much more established camera brands Canon and Nikon. Because the photos by GoPro’s audience are so engaging, the social channels are more likely to show the company’s other content too, because engagement breeds engagement. The upcoming chapter on the purposeful element showcases what GoPro and other brands do to perpetuate a long customer life cycle, including opportunities to share activity (coactions)—all in the name of a greater purpose.
Each of the next five chapters will explore the elements of context in greater depth, including examples of brands that are hitting the ball out of the park when it comes to the “what” of context marketing. These examples will show you how to develop a new idea of marketing and create highly contextual brand experiences—ones that engage your audience where they are, in the moment, and in ways they expect and desire. So let’s get to it—starting with available.