One of the many clichés passed on in the advertisement industry speaks of the advertisement’s role as a sales tool. You have undoubtedly heard sayings like “A good advertisement must sell.” As if you could cause a bank account to open just by you staring at a print advertisement of banking services. Even if an advertisement attracts you like nothing before, it takes a long way to have the transaction made, with many pitfalls and distractive factors waiting.

Sure, there are exceptions, such as teleshopping. But that is a realm playing by its own rules. We are convinced that the principal strength of marketing communication resides in influencing the consumer’s ways of thinking in order to get his attention, to make the consumer understand the communicated message and to have him make his own idea through which he may sooner or later take a decision. And as all of us make decisions throughout our lives, we acquire valuable experience in the process to steer us through the decision-making process.

All this happens as intensively as rich are our lives, as sophisticated is the society we live in. Developing a communicative message which passes the test and has the real effect, is thus ever more difficult. If we compare the costs and effectiveness of advertising campaigns of the last decade, we come to some alarming conclusions. Agencies tend to argue with statistical data on how the past campaigns are remembered. But let’s face it, isn’t it more effective to verify consumers’ opinion on the given issue, product, or service, before and after the campaign? And you don’t need any extensive research to do that. Regular assessment of retail or customer service outputs will certainly do.

You can certainly imagine how much more effective your marketing campaign could be if you could influence the process of experience formation. If only it were possible to exercise this kind of indirect influence in the stage of consumers’ opinion formation! In fact, this is possible, in a way. We all subconsciously tend to make the process of decision-making and opinion formation easy by anticipating results and applying existing opinions. If, at the right moment, we are subjected to information of this character, we will be more open towards messages that would have left us calm under normal circumstances. The methodology that employs these principles is called Experience Modelling.

Briefly said, these are communication activities which need not necessarily communicate a client’s brand, product, or service. Their main task is to “place within the living space” of a particularly determined consumer a set of messages and targeted stimuli aimed at containing the effect of a competitor’s advertising campaign for a specific period of time. This method is more often used to prepare a key segment of a target group for the client’s upcoming advertising campaign. With the right timing and extent, the effect of the main advertising campaign tends to be significantly extended.

This method is most used in online media. One advantage of the online media is that the communicated messages can be continually under control. This is why it is possible to break down a marketing communication into stages and prepare various corrective options. These may fill the gaps within the communicated message through classic channels and respond to various misinterpretations and failures of campaigns.

What the last decade has shown in the area of marketing communication is uncompromising. Never plan your marketing communication as an indivisible whole. The risk of wrong targeting or of prolix and aimless communication is too high. This holds true especially for nationwide and multinational campaigns.

Our latest experience in this field is extraordinarily encouraging. We have seen how effective it is to enhance current practice with new methodological approaches, such as Focused Associative Tagging, Experience Modelling, or Viral Marketing Communication. In Melodyworld, we follow closely all events in this field, and our know-how in this area gives our partners a way to communicate more effectively.