Know Which Cats You're Herding

BowerComm has handled the marketing for the Kansas State Fair since 2018, which means every September we have a remote office in my brother’s Winnebago, parked in the fairgrounds RV park.

My kids think the RV at the fair is, hands-down, the greatest perk of my job.

So on Saturday night, I chaperoned a posse of four sixth-grade boys spending the night.

If you have ever tried to herd four sixth-grade boys at a state fair or amusement park, you already know where this is going.

They wanted to ride the wildest rides. They wanted to spend all their money on carnival games that resulted in stuffed snakes and other things no household has ever actually needed. They wanted slushies. They wanted to mess with every button, switch and gadget in the RV. They wanted to stay up much later than I wanted them to stay up.

And on the drive home the next morning, my own sixth grader decided it would be hilarious to take over the sound system and start looking for songs with words he knew I wouldn’t appreciate.

That is how we discovered there is apparently a man on Spotify who has written a poop song for nearly every human name. (And I will say this: I was thrilled, because poop is a significantly easier topic to manage than a lot of what you hear in the average rap song.)

The whole experience reminded me of that old IBM Super Bowl commercial about herding cats.

Getting everybody back to the RV when they were supposed to be there, getting them to stop spending money on stupid carnival games, getting them to go to sleep and then getting them packed up again the next morning required more strategy than I had given the assignment credit for.

Years ago, I had a completely different cat-herding assignment at the same fair. It involved making a plan for a group of five women, all over 70, to spend the day there.

That was a different operation altogether.

Their challenges weren’t staying off carnival rides or blowing $30 trying to win a stuffed snake. We were thinking about mobility. Rest stops. How far one exhibit was from another. What we needed to see before everyone got tired. Where we needed to be and at what time.

Same Kansas State Fair. Completely different plan.

If I wanted my sixth grader to spend an hour looking at quilts, it would not happen through a PSA on why quilts are historically significant and beautifully made.

And if I wanted my 80-plus-year-old aunt on the Ring of Fire, it would not come from a $25 “all you can ride” wristband promotion.

I could communicate both of those messages perfectly well. I could make a beautiful ad, put money behind it, get it in front of exactly the right people and report back that thousands of people saw it.

None of that means I persuaded anybody to do anything.

I think we sometimes lose sight of that in communications. Communication itself is not the end game. The reason we communicate is because we want someone to do or believe something. We want them to attend, donate, volunteer, apply, enroll, buy, advocate, change a behavior or think differently about an issue. Whatever the action is, our job is to move them toward it.

Which means knowing who our audience is isn’t enough. We have to understand what might actually move them.

A lot of audience profiling never gets much further than demographics: women ages 35 to 65, donors, business owners, parents, the general public. Those descriptions can be useful, but they don’t tell us what we need to know to persuade someone. We need to know what they want, what they care about, what they are worried about, what they are likely to resist and what might make the action we’re asking them to take feel worth doing.

That is why clearly defining audiences is a key step in all of our work. We aren’t doing it to fill in an “audience” box on a planning worksheet. We’re trying to understand people well enough to develop communication that has a chance of persuading them.

With four sixth-grade boys, telling them it was time to go to sleep wasn’t enough. I had to understand what was keeping them awake, then block my son’s phone and turn off the lights. The words weren’t the strategy. Understanding what was driving their behavior was.

Think about one audience you’re trying to move right now. What do you actually want them to do? Why would they want to do it? Why might they not? What matters enough to them to get their attention?

If you can’t answer those questions, then writing more social posts, sending another email or buying another ad probably isn’t going to solve the problem.

You don’t have a communication problem yet.

You have a purr-suasion problem.

(And yes, I am a cornydog.)

Lori