Science and technology are more important than ever, but they are facing a crisis of public confidence. The Drum Network has put together a panel of experts to explain how good marketing can help.
The world recently turned its gaze skyward once again, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX company completed the breathtaking feat ‘capture’ a booster rocket between gigantic metal ‘tweezers’. An equally controversial figure (and a foundational figure in the Silicon Valley movement of which Musk is so famous), Ayn Rand once said in the 1960s, when the space race was last so hot, “It is man’s irrational emotions that will take him to the mud. It is man’s reason that leads him to the stars.”
Despite the live-streamed theatrical performances of the Super Heavy booster landing, surveys show a lack of confidence in the science and technology sector. Some 69% of respondents to this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer said innovation was poorly managed and did not benefit people like her. In the same way, the Campaign for Science and Engineering found that 61% of people do this that research and development (R&D) does not benefit them.
So do marketers have a role to play in getting people’s muddy emotions behind these great skyward efforts? And, whisper it, is there also a nice penny to be earned?
Fly in the ointment
For Andi Davids, Global Business Director at Bulletproof, these trust issues in the sector came into sharp focus during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I remember when Covid hit, I thought, ‘Oh God, for the first time ever, the big pharmaceutical brands are starting to become household names.’ People were suddenly much more aware of science,” she explains.
At the same time: “The future of science and technology is evolving. They are becoming more interdisciplinary, more complex and more important than ever.” Amid this crisis, the industry must work to recruit the best minds of the next generation to become scientists, she added.
For Cristina de Balanzo, CEO of Walnut Unlimited, the future of the sector depends on the ability to communicate clearly. “They need a repositioning campaign,” she says. “To show the benefits of the work they do by demystifying it. Because these companies send messages that are not understandable, that are not easy to understand and that turn people off.”
“People just don’t like it. Because they are not human in the way they communicate what these industries do and how they can benefit you in the long run.” The issue is also relevant, she adds, to the fast-growing AI sector, which often uses communications that many may find “alienating.”
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Solve the equation
So how can marketers keep the public’s attention on the industry’s dazzling performance and away from conspiracy theorists and other potential adversaries? #
For Mike Oliver, chief strategy officer at Radley Yeldar, the answer could be as simple as a chemical reaction. “It’s about trying to convey the wonder of what science does at different levels, and also what technology does. Because if you break it down and you’re back in school as a ten-year-old child, science wasn’t necessarily a boring subject. Science was the kind of subject where you blew things up in a lab, and you had crazy teachers who taught you what happens when you put this and this together.
According to Davids, the alchemy that marketers must undertake when it comes to selling the virtues of the sector can be divided into three components.
“If you really boil it down to the three almost dichotomies we’re trying to make: making the complex simple, making the rational emotional, and making the abstract tangible,” she explains. “These are, I think, three of the key challenges in this area that we’re trying to achieve through branding.”
For example, Davids points to work her team did for an authoritative chemistry database, which led to someone telling her, “After 25 years, my wife finally understands what I do.” Praise indeed.
Astronomical returns
There are also serious business considerations when it comes to clear messaging. Jason Megson, international director at Sparks, recalls recently working on a project for the security division of a global technology company. While his team was used to presenting the company’s work and products at trade shows and conferences, they were given the opportunity to present directly to the CEO of a major global trade show – and they took a chance.
“We created this crazy VR security scenario product where we took the CEO on a journey through all these different scenarios where his exchange was attacked by different security threats. But we have humanized all these cases. So it was less about data points and more about weird and wonderful characters that this person was interacting with.
The result of that demo? “The CEO talked to his CTO and said, ‘This is the product we want. Can we please make this purchase? I understand now: I understand why this is important, and I also understand why this particular product is the one we want to buy instead of the competing bids that have been placed on my desk.”
The outcome? Megson estimates that in return for investing about $200,000 in the field, the work earned his client a five-year, $180 million contract with the exchange. “It’s probably the best ROI I’ve ever had on anything I’ve ever done,” he says.
The marketing moonshot
Consumer technology is the corner of the sector that consumers have the most contact with thanks to their smartphones and laptops and scores better in trust polls. Edelman found that 76% of people have confidence in the technology sector despite real fears around privacy and technology replacing jobs.
Vibhu Bhan, Chief Operating and Information Officer at Creativ Strategies, says that while his agency is largely in the technology, gaming and media sectors, it faces the same challenges as marketers trying to explain the differences between two vaccines, or the value of interplanetary vaccines. space exploration.
When working in B2C, “the emphasis is on storytelling and providing the right story at the right time.” In his B2B work, just like with De Balanzo, ‘transparency’ is the key word. “There’s a fear that really relates to the opaqueness of the insight or why certain things are important,” Bhan explains. Overcoming this fear is about being able to answer the client’s questions: “How many people are behind that? What channel are they on and expressing certain emotions or sentiments against a product feature or whatever the tech company is trying to market?”
Explaining insights to customers and persuading them to take them into account avoids a ‘spit and talk’ approach to marketing products and services. Which, conveniently enough, brings to mind another old quote about the cosmos: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars.”
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