Durability

the missing piece in communication campaigns

by Matthew Goldberg & Abel Gustafson
October 2023

When organizations aim to influence their target audience they often turn to marketing, advertising, and PR. To ensure these communication strategies will be effective, the organization often conducts research ahead of time that tests the persuasive effects. Then, when they deploy the campaign, the organization also often evaluates its performance. 

Although this type of testing is essential, most organizations focus only on the immediate effects of their messaging, leaving the longer-term effects unknown. Most neglect to consider the durability of effects—the extent to which they last over time and resist competing influence. This can be a fatal error. 

Ensuring durable change is essential to achieve large, long-term goals. Consider the sharp rise in interest in artificial intelligence. Potential consumers might read an op-ed on artificial intelligence that raises concerns about its ethics and usage. Such an article can be quite persuasive, and companies might use their internal message testing to guide their outreach, marketing, and advertising efforts. However, it is possible that the initial effects of reading the article fade, and people return to their original level of beliefs and concerns. This is why durability is crucial—it captures the emphasis on long-term efforts.

Durability as Strategy

Focusing on durability changes your perspective on interventions to consider and which tactics to deploy. When making tactical decisions, you often need to navigate a Reach X Effect Tradeoff, where one tactic might reach many people with small effects per person reached (e.g., social media advertising), but a different tactic would have much larger effects per person but are much harder to scale (e.g., face-to-face conversations).

Bringing durability into the picture adds another strategic consideration: it does not matter how many people you reach and how much they are affected if those effects do not last.

It is important to focus on durability throughout the strategic process. This is because if you’re only looking at immediate messaging effects before thinking about long-term goals, you might be headed towards a dead end because you’re only focused on tactics that have fleeting effects. This is especially crucial with emerging technology, where there is immense pressure to get through the next day, next week, or next few months. Playing the long game gives companies a strategic edge while their competitors focus mostly on the day-to-day.

Consider another example showing that communication campaigns can find a target audience for whom messaging effects are most likely to last. In a classic messaging study, researchers found that people vary widely in the strength with which people form their opinions, and people who have a high propensity to form strong opinions are more likely to have lasting changes to their beliefs in response to messaging, and those beliefs are also more likely to resist competing messaging. This type of strategic focus would be totally missed by focusing only on immediate effects. This insight is incredibly important in the chaotic media landscape of emerging technology.

Timing is Everything

Timing is also an important consideration when it comes to durability. Some interventions require more durability than others. For example, to reduce the effects of misinformation, one approach is to train people in media literacy and equip them with the tools to avoid being duped by misinformation. These types of interventions can be highly effective and durable, but one drawback is that it is difficult to get people to learn about how to avoid being influenced by misinformation.

On the other hand, interventions that are built within a platform do not necessarily require high durability for the intervention to be highly effective. Research has shown that people often fail to think when they are making the knee-jerk reaction of whether to share something on social media. If you nudge people to think about accuracy at the moment when they decide whether or not to share information on social media, they become much better at discerning misinformation from accurate information. Clearly, different interventions can reduce the spread of misinformation in different ways, but these examples illustrate how a focus on durability enhances thinking about which interventions to consider, and why.

So What?

In conclusion, while it is certainly important to understand which messages and types of interventions one could use to influence a target audience, it is important to recognize that this is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. To truly make a long-term impact, it is essential to focus on durability — whether your interventions can withstand competing messages and the test of time. By taking durability into account, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the interventions that you are considering, as well as those of your competitors. When you consider durability from the outset, you will be better equipped to create interventions that are effective and that will continue to deliver results in the long run.

Citation

This paper and the insights it reports may be cited as:

Gustafson, A. & Goldberg, M. H. (2023). Durability: The Missing Piece in Communication Campaigns. XandY Analytics. Retrieved from https://www.xandyanalytics.com/durability-the-missing-piece/