Why is digital marketing failing to connect brands and audiences?

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A fundamental disconnect is emerging between what is produced in the digital realm, and what resonates with consumers. To understand the disconnect, I believe we need to go back to the origins of the Internet to see how a fundamental flaw shaped and distorted digital marketing for years to come.

So, what is this fundamental flaw? It became clear to me when my company, Pixelpusher, branched out into the experiential world. Seeing real people interacting with live brand installations made it abundantly clear –you connect with people by appealing to their hearts and telling them a story.

The flaw then, is this: The nomenclature we use as digital marketers comes from the programming world, and is too limiting to create real emotional connections.

We’ll start with the word “user”probably the most used word in the digital lexicon. Commonly used by everyone from digital marketers to usability experts and creative technologists, “user”rolls off the tongue so easily it is hardly given second thought.

For those of us that remember, the term comes from digital’s early programmer-driven days when people were seen as nothing more than fingers clicking a mouse. Now, I’ll admit, if your only measure of success is filling a metric with finger-clickers, the term works. But for enlightened digital marketers that want to create real emotional connections between people and brands, “users”is woefully inadequate.

Try this. Take a step back from whichever brief you’re working on and think about who it’s really for – people. The people you’re targeting, the ones sitting in front of their device interacting with your brand are much more than “users”. They are customers, gamers, moms, dads, students, athletes, real people who live and breathe. Thinking of them as “users”pigeonholes our thinking by reducing our audience down to the digital interface itself. For agencies and brands, it also frequently generates flat results, far removed from the experience they want to put out there. We see it over and over again.

None of this should even come as a surprise. Think about the term “user”outside of the digital space. Say it out loud: User. What comes to mind? Drug users…people users…on its own the word conjures overwhelmingly negative sentiment. Essentially, when we say “user”, we’re starting from a negative place and expecting positive results. Clearly, a friendlier, warmer term is needed, and a new approach to thinking about the people who are going to interact with what we create.

Another example: If you’ve sat in a digital brief recently, someone has probably asked a team be asked to take the lead on “content generation”. This might be to populate social media feeds, fill blogs or create web pages. In the same way that “user”reduces real, actual humans into nothing more than finger clickers, “content”strips the twin elements of “surprise”and “delight”from the equation. “Entertain moms with a surprising story about Fabio’s hair”, for example, becomes “Engage users with content”. Intrigued? Probably not.

Here again the word that rolls off the tongue, “content”, was birthed in the programming world prior to making the jump to marketing and advertising. From “content”, we get “pouring content”, “developing content”, “pieces of content”and “content marketing”. We speak about our creative work as though it were an afterthought, and not in fact, the prime directive. We have to realize that real people don’t form emotional connections to “content”. Why waste time brainstorming, if you’re doing so through the lens of “content generation”? The whole premise lacks any feeling or depth, and the results will prove it.

So, what to do? We need to remember how to connect with people not “users”. We need to remember how to surprise and delight our audience. We need to rediscover how to tell stories rather than produce content. Essentially, we have to return to what worked before the Internet. Digital has changed how we communicate but it shouldn’t change what we are communicating. Look in the mirror. Are you a user? Let’s never forget that the audience we communicate with are made up of individuals, real people like you and I.