Now that you know your positioning, you can work on your communication objectives. When you reach this stage of the process, you have to consider how customers behave toward your brand and products.
Find Out More About Your Consumers
To define your advertising objectives, you need to understand your consumer:
Their purchasing motivations, so you can tailor your message and turn your product into an object of desire.
The issues that cause consumers not to purchase your product so you can remove them, creating a more favorable attitude.
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can more easily determine your different advertising goals. They will allow you to better guide consumer behavior toward your product.
Determine Your Customer Impact Objectives
There are three types of customer attitudes you can play on to help achieve a business goal:
Cognitive Goals
Cognitive goals allow you to develop brand awareness and, consequently, your products and services. You act on the consumer's ability to reason, make a decision, and remember something. It usually uses a massive and repetitive communication strategy.
For example, "Nothing runs like a Deere" for the John Deere brand.
Emotional Goals
Emotional goals allow you to develop a positive brand perception to make it loved by the consumer. You play on the emotional register, appeal to the consumer's sensitivity, and create the desire to purchase through feelings.
John Lewis Partnership, a chain of department stores in the UK - and their sister supermarket Waitrose, have become famous for their Christmas advertisements over the past few years. The 2019 example featured a little girl's friend, Excitable Edgar, a dragon whose overenthusiastic fire breathing wreaked havoc with many traditional winter pastimes. Without directly featuring any of the products on offer in the stores, this commercial generated a real sense of Christmas spirit - a strong emotional appeal!
Activation Goals
Activation objectives allow you to move the consumer from desire to the act of purchasing. You fuel desire through qualitative messages, and remove the obstacles to purchase, encouraging the consumer to try your product and adopt a positive attitude.
For example, Coca-Cola Zero is a sugar-free version of the original brand that still has the original Coke flavor. Evian offers the promise of eternal youth with its Live Young campaign. This advertising type makes it easier to take action, increases the desire to buy, and reduces the obstacles to purchase.
Evian “Live young” campaign 2O16
🥤 Discover Which Goals Bio Boost Opts For
Considering the example of Candice and Julien's energy drink start-up, what objectives can you identify?
As a reminder, Candice and Julien will launch an innovative new organic product. The brand has existed for two years and already has a good reputation with distributors and the general public. This new line extends the brand into a new market segment, attracting new customers who consume organic products.
Based on the information you know, you can deduce that Candice and Julien are going to:
Eliminate the cognitive objectives since the general public already knows what energy drinks are.
Eliminate the emotional goals since they already have a good brand image in their market.
Candice and Julien will probably focus on:
Conative goals to encourage organic consumers to test Bio Boost🥤 with the promise of a product that matches their consumption preferences.
Let's Recap!
You are in a provider-recipient relationship, and your goal is to attract the consumer to your products or services.
Your objectives progress depending on your market maturity: you go from the 1st to the 2nd, then finish with the 3rd:
Get them to know you.
Get them to love you.
Get them to take action.
You also have to take your product and its target into account to decide which objectives to pursue and with what intensity.
Now that you can define your goals, you're ready to take another key step in defining your advertising strategy. You'll now focus on your future strategies, which will allow you to take advantage of new opportunities or develop new segments for your products and services.
