The Theory of Resilient Audiences
At Swash Labs, we know from deep experience that the practice of building audiences — and, by extension, developing brands — happens all too often with a bias towards expediency, always at the expense of resilience. We mean this in the most literal sense: If you’ve driven on potholed roads or worried about a crumbling bridge or power grid in your city, you know the end result of a bias towards expediency over resiliency.
It is human nature to want to solve a threatening problem in the easiest and most expedient way possible. Brands, political campaigns, and nonprofits tend to pick tactics and strategies that require the least amount of work or uncomfortable change while producing results that look big or impactful on the surface. The nature of their professional positions means executives are often forced into operating from a place of putting out fires and judging decisions in the short term. Over the long term, the organizations in their charge suffer as the affordable and fast solution ends up costing the organization significantly more over time.
Often with the best of intentions, brands and campaigns will make communications choices that align with the way things have always been done (in an effort, conscious or unconscious, to preserve institutional momentum), or they will jump on a trend or gimmick without sufficiently resourcing or understanding it (to solve for a perceived shortcoming). Decision-makers will opt for something spectacular and highly visible even if the outcome is uncertain, unmeasurable in a meaningful way, or entirely unsustainable. These methods are almost always more expensive and less effective over time than building an audience with resiliency in mind.
Decision-makers will opt for something spectacular and highly visible even if the outcome is uncertain, unmeasurable in a meaningful way, or entirely unsustainable.
Our working theory of resilient audiences asserts that this is not only no longer necessary, but in fact represents a huge risk to the brand, as well as an existential threat to the basic precepts of modern commerce.
To that end, we begin our campaign in earnest to convince brands to build resilient audiences. The Theory of Resilient Audiences is an approach we’ve been developing at Swash Labs over the last two years, one which can describe the evolution of the media and information environment in recent years, a set of changes that fundamentally altered how the brand development and audience-building processes of marketing and advertising actually work and should ideally be undertaken.
Consider the following description of the current media and informational environment as a jumping-off point for our working theory:
“Individuals begin a relationship with a brand or entity in a state of distrust. The benefit of the doubt can no longer be assumed.“
What is a resilient audience?
A brand’s audience is the collection of consumers that are functionally available to a brand for communication and engagement. A resilient audience has come to trust a brand, and having done so, is inclined to believe what a brand says. This audience is also willing to engage by taking some action requested by the brand in service of furthering the brand’s goals. The requested action could be buying a product, using a hashtag, sending a letter to the editor, or recommending a service to a friend.
The resilient audience’s belief — literally, the quality of the audience trusting the brand and believing what it has to say — is rooted in a strong parasocial relationship between the two. To the audience, the brand occupies the same space as a trustworthy person they know in real life.
Functionally, the brand is now an anthropomorphized sentient being. No one involved really thinks that a brand is a living and conscious entity — corporations are not people, my friend — but rather, when we as humans have a deep connection to a brand, this is how the identity, relationship, and information surrounding that brand sits in our brains.
A resilient audience has come to trust a brand, and having done so, is inclined to believe what a brand says.
Broadcast, social, and digital media have intensified the behavior of individuals aligning themselves with brands or concepts in this way over the last 20 years. While this behavior has always existed to some extent, it has spread and accelerated as media has evolved. Within the last five to ten years, the number of people who substitute ideologically aligned online groups for trusted loved ones as an epistemological source of truth and reality has increased dramatically. For an example of this, consider the shift from that one relative you had who would send the whole family wacky email chain letters about urban legends and conspiracy theories in 2007, and then think about how often you’ve seen an intense version of this behavior among people you know well on social media, and how surprised that once made you feel, and how now you’ve come to expect it.
In these instances, the ideologically aligned online group is the trustworthy anthropomorphized entity. This substitution is not, as you reasonably may have once suspected, the sole domain of politics. It can now occur in connection with any dimension of conscious human life.
In some ways, everything about objective reality and our ability to perceive it has always been vulnerable in this way, and digital media has accelerated the vulnerability into a crisis. Misinformation (and its much more sinister cousin, disinformation) poses an existential threat, on a macro level, to organized human society. In a more narrow view, it also poses a very serious and demonstrable threat to businesses, brands, political organizations, and public individuals.
A resilient audience has the capability to guard itself — to be resilient — against misinformation. Building an audience for resiliency rather than expediency, i.e. for long-term stability and value as opposed to building for the short-term extraction of revenue or other benefits, helps ensure that a brand’s audience will see mitigated disinformation risk and will grow more resilient over time. When an organization commits to maintaining and evolving a resilient audience, the strength of the audience endures.
How is this different from what we’ve done before?
Earlier, we stated that the tendency to build infrastructure for expediency rather than resiliency boils down to human nature, and how our brains are wired to deal with risks and threats. We are bad at both once we get outside the realm of simple survival: our brains are very good at keeping us alive, but not great at keeping us happy, judging risks, or managing non-critical threats.
Much of the normative approach to brand communication thinking — the approach which favors expedience over resiliency — is nothing more than a case of seemingly inescapable institutional momentum and the avoidance of the uncomfortable unknown. Why should anything be done differently when this is the way we’ve always done it, and to change how we do things would take so much work and upheaval?
In service of (and as an abject demonstration of) this human tendency, the early days of digital marketing (meaning from 2000-2015 or so) saw advertisers and agencies attempt to replicate old advertising thinking, especially in terms of targeting, creative work, and brand development. This is what was understood to be effective, so brands ran the same plays on an entirely new playing field, to wildly varying and unpredictable results.
As early phase digital communications and marketing tools became available to enterprise-level advertisers, digital targeting and remarketing became brute force exercises. The intrusive nature of these tactics only got more pronounced as the technology became more sophisticated. Essentially, the hard-sell/transactional nature of advertising, often purpose-built to generate short-term gains — and to drive initial trial at any cost — continued.
At the same time, new options and methods for reaching people flattened some elements of the digital communications landscape. This made levels of reach and efficacy (and optimization) for small and medium businesses possible that were previously unavailable, usually due to the high cost associated with running effective TV, print, radio, or out-of-home advertising campaigns.
These two forces eventually met in the middle. In the last five years or so, smaller organizations like small businesses, political campaigns, and nonprofits eventually gained access to platforms, tools, and methods that allowed them to run more sophisticated campaigns, with far less yelling and far better measurement.
Some of them still yell, though, even though the tools for avoiding some version of yelling are more sophisticated and effective. Now, the tactic is a never-ending bombing campaign of emails and text messages and fifteen ads for the thing you just bought on Amazon showing up on Facebook. This is degenerate behavior. We call it “high frequency” now, and although it is gently discouraged by the platforms, it is not often completely disallowed.
And so, the brute force stuff was more available, too, and plenty of small organizations opted to build audiences for expedience rather than resiliency. In doing so, they spent money very inefficiently and often very late in the process, with the expectation that reaching a digital audience was something that could be left until the last minute, and could be done effectively without investing time and effort along the way.
I can’t really blame marketers for acting this way, because this behavior was and is regularly encouraged by platforms hungry for ad revenue, inefficient and non-optimized as the outcomes may be.
Why are non-resilient audiences so problematic?
This kind of communication tends to result in largely disengaged, stunted audiences that have little inclination towards or true identification with the brand, other than a surface-level awareness which could lead to the possibility of a nascent transactional relationship. The manner in which these audiences are built is problematic: the audiences themselves are smaller, less useful, less motivated, and less valuable than they could be. Your window to ask them for anything is very short. Remember, you got their attention at the last minute by yelling at them or throwing something at their head from across the room. They are likely to be at least a little annoyed; they are certainly invested in figuring out how to get you to leave them alone. If the audience is generally aligned with what you’re doing or interested in your product, the best you can hope for is that you may, with a low hit rate, get one shot at product or service trial out of this kind of behavior. Bad marketers solve for the low hit rate with volume and frequency. They are wrong to do this, and they should rethink their professional lives.
Audiences built for expediency are much more difficult to keep energized and engaged. These audiences are often built around some chronological termination point such as an election, a sale, an event, or a season. After this termination point, engagement and value drop even more, even if there’s another fixed point in the future towards which to work. This audience doesn’t trust the brand — it's just that the brand kept throwing things at the audience until the audience paid attention. The awareness is short-lived, begrudgingly given, and devoid of trust or reflective identification.
Audiences built for expediency are much more difficult to keep energized and engaged.
The cost of re-engaging with these audiences for future chronological trigger points is extremely high, both in terms of time and money. Sometimes it can be worse than starting over, because you burned your first shot with some people in this audience with bad behavior.
How do resilient audiences combat misinformation?
Perhaps most importantly, at least in a big-picture sense, non-resilient audiences are very vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.
For political campaigns, this means that the audience is not really useful to a candidate or cause under attack. This audience may either abandon the relationship entirely (and stay home) or become persuaded against the candidate or cause itself.
However, this is a much bigger problem for corporations and institutions. For non-political brands, the mis- and disinformation risks are very real, and the costs associated with those realized risks are enormous.
Consider these examples of disinformation risk in the corporate sector, quoted here from those compiled in a white paper by PricewaterhouseCoopers in February 2021:
Financial gain
Using software powered by artificial intelligence (AI), bandits spoofed the voice of an energy firm’s CEO, demanding the fraudulent transfer of close to a quarter of a million dollars to a supplier in another country.
Misidentifying themselves, thieves used an online ad to attract work-at-home employees under false pretenses. In the repackaging and reshipping scheme, workers who thought they’d been hired by a trucking company unknowingly mailed parcels overseas to the wrong addresses. Workers were never paid and owners of stolen credit cards were charged for goods never received.
Disruption of competitive dynamics
A story on a (faked) news site falsely reported that a major social media company had received a $31 billion takeover bid. The hoax, created via a fake domain registered to a proxy service in a foreign country, drove a spike in the company’s shares.
A semiconductor giant’s planned merger with another tech company was interrupted due to false news alleging a governmental review of the transaction due to (nonexistent) national security threats. The scam incorporated a fake Department of Defense memo. Stocks of both companies fell temporarily.
Disruption of markets
A foreign adversary disseminated unscientific claims alleging 5G’s dire health threats through a TV segment falsely linking 5G to brain cancer, infertility, autism, heart tumors, and Alzheimer’s disease. The resulting public concern may have slowed the implementation of 5G in the US, giving the adversary’s companies more time to develop their own 5G network.
Issue advocacy
Users of an anonymous imageboard website, seeking to hurt a “liberal” business, spread a rumor that a coffee giant was giving free drinks to undocumented immigrants. Plotters posted a fake promotional meme with a misleading hashtag on social media outlets. The false controversy was designed to damage the target company’s brand.
False information, launched with malicious intent, has led to financial losses, loss of customer trust, and brand damage for companies around the world. It actively threatens all businesses.
This also results in a difficult and inescapable situation, in which the lies of those pushing misinformation (or actively running a disinformation effort) become the most visible and engaging narrative, hijacking any ability for the campaign to control the message even when “the message” is an objective reality. This manipulation of the algorithmic output of search engines and social platforms matters, and has a real impact: on public perception, on brand equity, and on stock prices. This relatively new fact-of-life has even inspired the creation of entirely new industries, such as disinformation as a service or, more colorfully, “dark PR,” in which practitioner firms pledge to “use every tool and take every advantage available in order to change reality according to our client's wishes.”
So, the upside of building brands and audiences with a bias towards resilience rather than expediency is simply that it is good for business. It reflects the only rational method for developing a brand in the 21st century because it is the only approach that properly acknowledges what’s changed about our information environment in the last 10-20 years.
And, for good measure, it also just happens to mitigate a significant and existential risk to any public-facing organization, a risk that cannot be eliminated: a resilient audience is less likely to believe disinformation, and is more likely to come to the defense of and advocate for a brand facing the effects of disinformation risk. If you need any proof of this, look at what happened to the New York Post when they ran a story — implying that he’d done something wrong — about Snoop Dogg smoking weed before his recent Super Bowl halftime performance. It is a slightly silly example, but it is also an understatement to say that the story backfired.
Finally (and perhaps most importantly for CEOs and CMOs hunting for a simple explanation of the ROI of the work involved in building audiences for resilience): if you build a resilient audience, you will gain a competitive advantage over rival companies, because your comms infrastructure will not only acknowledge the current information environment, but will be attuned to it as well.
If you build a resilient audience, you will gain a competitive advantage over rival companies.
In the near future, we’ll be exploring our theory in greater detail and offering guidance for how advertisers and marketers can incorporate this practice into their communications and media planning. For now, it is enough to understand that brand development and communications must change because consumers (and voters, and donors, and humans in general) have changed. The old rules no longer apply, and you — yes, even those of you in the C-Suite — have to live in the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.