Picture This!

Emerson once wrote in his Journals, "In good writing, words become one with things."

It turns out to be true of all writing.

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have discovered that, when you read, a tiny portion of your brain behind your left ear sees the words not as strings of letters or symbols, but as pictures.

The neurons in that part of your brain store words in their entirety, as if there were a little dictionary inside your skull.

When you look at a word you know, your brain instantly sees a picture.

Your spongy little dictionary (called the "visual word form area") works precisely like the miniature photo album located in the opposite side of your brain, behind your right ear. 

In that part of your brain (called the "fusiform face area"), pictures of people's faces are stored.

The researchers also discovered that students with reading disabilities can improve their skill by learning words as visual objects, instead of struggling with phonics and spelling.

Shoddy Content Can Only Fail

Introduced in 1813, shoddy is a cheap woolen cloth made from recycled rags. Victorian-era manufacturers used it to make low-end clothing.

Civil War soldiers—whose shoddy uniforms would disintegrate after only days—are responsible for our use of the word to mean cheap workmanship.

By flocking to shoddy content, today's marketers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

But it won't work, says Jeff Rosenblum, a columnist for Ad Age.

A marketing movement is underway to deluge customers with shoddy content—a movement that gives Rosenblum deja vu.

"I'm getting nasty flashbacks to the early days of banner ads," he writes. 

"When banner ads first came out, the marketing industry treated them like rebranded laundry detergent—'new and improved!' So, we shifted a bunch of dollars online and used half-baked data to prove it worked. Until, of course, we realized it didn't."

Banner ads bombed because marketers didn't grasp their value.

"The same will be true of content if we don't apply the lessons we learned. If we simply develop content because we think it's new, improved, quicker and easier than previous tactics, we're doomed to get the same disappointing results that we got from banner ads."

Content works, Rosenblum says, when it's understood:

• Content improves brand perceptions. "Great content shows customers why a brand is different and better than the competition. It creates evangelists that carry the brand message more effectively than paid media ever could," Rosenblum says.

• Content empowers customers. The premise is straightforward: customers give you their time; you give them useful information. "It's easy to create a social post with a cute kitten and generate a bunch of social shares, but that doesn't do anything for the brand in the long run."

• Content is more than clicks. Marketers need to measure more than likes and shares. "You need to understand how well the audience understands what makes the brand different and better. You need to understand what, specifically, shifts them down the sales funnel and generates revenue."

• Content isn't cheap. "Too often, brands spend countless hours talking about the power of social media, but spend an infinitesimal amount of their overall budget creating content."

"Unlike banner ads, content marketing can fundamentally alter the future of a brand. But it won't be quick and it won't be easy," Rosenblum concludes.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald once told a would-be writer, "Nothing any good isn't hard."

Spotlighting the Skeptics

Can you be trusted with customers' data?

The answer depends on who you ask, according to a new study by Royal Mail MarketReach.

The firm asked 7,000 consumers in the UK whether they trusted marketers to use their data ethically, and protect it from thieves and hackers. 

Its findings show:

• Older people worry about potential data abuse more than younger people;

• Women are more reluctant to give marketers data, and want greater reassurance that their data will be safe, than men; and

• High-wage earners trust marketers with their data more than low-wage earners do.

Embracing Swag

Mimicking their B2C cousins, savvy B2B marketers are plying swag to secure customers' loyalty, says a new white paper from Forrester Research.

B2B Loyalty, The B2C Way offers dozens of examples:

• On Super Bowl Sundays, a marketing automation provider—knowing its customers are at work—ships them "war room care packages."

• A B2B phone company sends customers a catalog of general merchandise they can buy for loyalty points.

• Another B2B phone company lets customers use their loyalty points to bid in an auction for tickets to sports events.

"Loyalty programs may be a B2C construct, but the concepts apply in B2B marketing," the white paper says. 

"As B2B marketers get serious about loyalty, they can jumpstart their efforts by embracing some B2C approaches. In some cases, it may be a matter of reframing, organizing, and scaling what’s already in place."

Un Words

Before you unfriend that geek you unearthed at the unconference on unmarketing last week, pause for a moment of gratitude.

You can thank two IBM researchers, Lance Miller and John Thomas, for our love of "un" words.

Musing over computer commands, they wrote in a 1976 report, “It would be quite useful to permit users to ‘take back’ at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special ‘undo’ command).”

But Shakespeare also favored "un" words.

The Bard is responsible for no fewer than 314 of the ones that appear in The Oxford English Dictionary, including unsex, unshout, unspeak and unswear.

Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, has her character say, “I had learned to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now.”

And contemporary songsters like "un" words, too.

Among Bob Dylan lyrics, one of my favorites goes:

"You taught me how to love you, baby

You taught me, oh, so well.
Now, I can’t go back to what was, baby
I can’t unring the bell."