“Futureshock”. Alvin Toffler coined this term in 1970 to sum up the potential damage to people of too much change in too short a period of time; the consequence of an exponential rate of development in a ‘super-industrialised’ society, writes Philip Graves. Looking around, it’s hard to see where Toffler’s overwhelmed people are. On the contrary, the damage is being felt by businesses who are struggling to keep pace with consumers’ rapidly-shifting patterns of consumption.

One of these new patterns is how the Internet is increasingly being accessed on the move. Once you could be confident that your eMarketing (a term I’ll use to encapsulate marketing through both email and social media) was landing on the desk of someone sitting in front of a computer, who would process it in a somewhat linear and focused fashion. Now those messages are arriving in the hands of people in a multitude of different locations, and who are usually engaged in other activities at the same time.

This practice has become so commonplace that we take it for granted, but the fact is that mobile marketing has become a whole new discipline. Marketers need to understand what this means for them and their content, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

So what does this new trend to ‘marketing on the move’ mean for you and your marketing campaigns? Some recent findings in consumer psychology can help cast a light on this phenomenon and ensure your organisation doesn’t become one of those overwhelmed by the pace of change.

Psychology of eMarketing on the move: a new challenge
We now know that human behaviour is largely driven by the unconscious mind. Possessed with the capacity to process far more information, far more quickly than the conscious mind, it is the primary job of the unconscious to filter for what’s ‘important’ and direct our conscious attention towards it. This filtering is done automatically and instantly, without us being aware of it.

Beyond that, we also rely on our unconscious mind to save energy by handling routine actions efficiently and, rather than work something out from scratch, we frequently fall back on unconsciously held heuristics (rules of thumb) to help us act and react with minimal effort.

Numerous psychological studies have demonstrated how elements in the surroundings that should be irrelevant alter how people respond to the same stimulus. To give just three examples, when classical background music was played in a wine store, customers spent up to three times as much on a bottle of wine in comparison to pop music. The reaction to adverts of people who knew a lot about cars could be influenced by whether or not they were first shown an ad featuring a prestigious brand or an everyday one. And women shopping in a DIY store with a female companion have been observed to spend on average 75 per cent longer than someone on her own.

This challenge presents three broad options for marketers. The first is to ignore the potential for variation in context and hope for the best. The second is to guess at the most likely factors to influence eMarketing on the move and include them in the design of your campaigns. The third is to develop sufficiently sophisticated data profiling to identify the context in which eMarketing is received and target consumers with a suitably nuanced message.

Whilst option three is, undoubtedly, the optimum route, particularly when a powerful ‘test and learn’ capability is supporting it, option two is a pragmatic place to start.

Attention span
eMarketing received on a smartphone is likely to be given less attention than that encountered on a PC for three reasons. First, there is likely to be something else competing for the recipient’s attention at that time which will influence their response. Secondly, the physical scale of the device means that there is less space with which to generate impact and gain the recipient’s attention. Thirdly, the nature of the device the message is being viewed on, and the way in which the recipient is used to interacting with it, will generate a particular type of mindset (e.g. finger scrolling, pinch to zoom in/out, etc.).

In such circumstances, the instantaneous reaction to the sender’s name and the subject line are of paramount importance if any further communication is to stand a chance of taking place.

This all merely serves as taster to our understanding of the psychology of eMarketing to smartphones and important lessons can be learned to identify the challenges, ensure the success of campaigns and improve our understanding of the future.

Philip Graves is a consumer behaviour consultant, author and speaker