High Altitude Marketeering

If you didn’t catch the brouhaha over bra colors this weekend, you can read about it on this Wall Street Journal blog. In the lightning-fast, news-and-analysis lifecycle, the status-posting campaign had hardly begun before it began to get deconstructed, analyzed, blogged and parodied.

The “fors” claimed that it helps raise awareness of breast cancer. The “againsts” call it worthless titillation. Whatever it was, it took off, probably exposing millions to the idea and building membership for anti-breast-cancer Facebook pages. To a marketer, those numbers sound like proof of a successful campaign. Great reach! Great frequency! Great work! Message delivered. Uh, what message?

This isn’t the first time disease fighters have launched a vaguely directed awareness campaign. Red AIDS ribbons and Livestrong bracelets were designed to bring awareness to their issues. The bra color campaign had the same goals. But as Marcy Carmichael wrote in her Newsweek blog last week: “At this point, there can’t be a person in the world who isn’t aware of breast cancer.”

You may counter that the wearing of a wristband or the Tweeting of a bra color represent an act of solidarity. Participants are not just looking to raise awareness, but to state their commitment to an cause. This, of course, is the idea behind celebrity endorsements: that personal commitment helps build the perceived importance of an issue. But the public hardly needs an army of the just to lend gravitas to the issue of breast cancer. It’s cancer for God’s sake. We know it’s serious. What’s needed are resources for research, treatment and prevention.

Even if last week’s bra campaign caused a discernible spike in the number of Americans aware of breast cancer, it’s far from clear that this will result in contributions, letters to senators or any of the other tangible steps that may help bring resources to the fight. Why? Because it was too easy. Social media makes it very easy for communicators to get the word out. One of the reasons for this is that reception and retransmission of the messages now require so little mind-time by those that pass them along. Yes, it’s community participation, but it’s participation at such a low level of engagement that it’s not worth much.

The lesson to brand and product marketers is that while new tools make it far easier to build awareness on a limited budget than anyone would have thought possible five years ago, awareness in itself isn’t much of a goal. It may be that the sheer difficulty of building brand awareness in the old days made it seem like the brass ring. But by lowering the bar, we have lowered the value of the prize—one more metric shifted by changing media.

What hasn’t changed is the fundamental rule of marketing communications: know what you want to say. Dissemination is a means to an end. If what you deliver to the ears and eyeballs of the Internet isn’t carefully crafted to drive recipients to a very specific action, you’re wasting everyone’s time. The opportunities provided by new media are enormous but they’re only as good to marketers as the messages they deliver.