Should marketers expect to educate consumers?
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Many marketing strategies and campaigns are premised on the expectation that consumers can be educated. This is often a mistaken assumption, since people in general must first want to learn. Understanding the triggers of this intention is key to success.
The truism of education - that a desire for knowledge, and willingness to change habits or beliefs, must precede any effort to teach - has been know in pedagogy for centuries. It is a difficult and transitory quality of human experience, often dependent on a strange alchemy of personality and individual proclivities, and the ever-changing contexts of place and time. People often refuse to be taught things they objectively should want or need to know; conversely, they often want to learn about topics that have no reasonable or practical use or benefit whatsoever.
If your marketing strategy or campaign plan uses the word "educate" anywhere in its design, you're probably sitting on much more of an uncertain and uncontrollable variable than you realize. Consider these qualities of education that might be useful in amending your plan and/or its goals:
Curiosity and need
There are two broad levers to initiating the desire to learn; the first, curiosity, is a determination that a topic or issue has some innate value, which is based on an individuals' definition of value. The facts or events of history have value to historians, but only because they've decided they're valuable. Ditto for entertainment, sports, and politics. People are curious about these things, so they want to learn about them. They have innate value to them.The second trigger of the desire to learn is need, as in when an individual has a requirement for information. This perception is of external value; a subject or thing has innate benefits that an individual desires to possess. Learning to ride a bike, drive a car, or fly an airplane are all activities that have innate value. Most brands fall into this category of learning; even if they prompt curiosity because of some entertaining or awareness-generating quality, the desire to learn is usually prompted by an need, whether real or perceived.
Inspiration
Although information is the substance of all content, the purpose of most marketing isn't to inform but to inspire. This requires that you reorient your perspective from the qualities or benefits you believe your product or editing services possesses, and instead work to understand the prompts of curiosity and need among your target audience(s) so that you can develop creative that will inspire them to learn. This is a particularly challenging task when innovation has given you an arguably improved offer, yet the perceptual hurdles of understanding are broad or many (or both). Simply providing information is not enough, contrary to some of the arguments for "content marketing." Your responsibility is to translate information into creative that not only engages, but motivates curiosity or activates need.Overcoming habit
Human beings are at once wonderfully adaptive and also very much creatures of habit. We tend to rely on things we know and behaviors with which we're familiar, even if we consciously know that the things and activities are inefficient or unsatisfying. No amount of "educating" can overcome these almost genetic hurdles; you must rely on curiosity and need, and then inspiring learning to address these obstacles. So it's very important that when you first consider educating consumers, you spend time understanding and deconstructing their habits: What people do, when, why, and with what costs and benefits that are real to them, not to some absolute measure of what they should know.If your slide presentation relies on a bullet point or connective line between two boxes labeled "educate," you should step back and consider what you expect. Education is a rich, complex concept and, as such, is a variable that you may want to define with far greater clarity before you operationalize your plan. In fact, you may whittle it down to its constituent parts and replace the term altogether.