The first two installments in this three-article series, “The addictive properties of digital communication” and “Face it – your job is to exploit digital addiction,” leads us to the obvious question: how do we shape the digital behavior of our target audience? However, before we answer this question, there is one more obvious question to think about: why do digital marketers do such a poor job of leveraging this most powerful addictive force of behavior?
We’re all friends here, fellow travelers, so to speak. We can handle the truth. Our job as digital marketers is to discover the tendencies, proclivities, cravings, location, and absolute digital desires of our HCP audiences in order to deliver our pitch, or our client’s pitch. Our mission is to cause our audience to behave, or continue to behave, in a way that supports our commercial mission. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, how do we capitalize on the digital addiction of our target audience? First, we need to understand the nature of digital addiction in its rawest elements.
Are you familiar with the addictive properties of digital communication, so, as a marketer, you can exploit them? How addictive is addictive? Think in terms of the Digital Panic Scale – the DPS. The DPS is measured by DEFCON ratings, which are scaled from 1 to 5, where 5 equals Armageddon Destroys The World As We Know It. The DPS scale goes up to 10, because the only thing more significant than the end of the world is the end of my MD – my mobile device.
