“Advertising is the cost of being boring.” – Andy Sernovitz, author, Word of Mouth Marketing

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One of the big challenges for marketing is to break through customer and marketplace boredom with your products, customer experience and your company. In the helter of life, sometimes people most need solutions that solve problems, save time, and have no surprises. Sometimes they need problems, excitement, connection, and the unknown to liven things up. It’s hard to know which.

A few organizations are good at bringing drama, excitement, and spice to our lives: Apple produces exciting products — iPods, iPhones and iPads. Facebook has produced all kinds of drama around their recent IPO after creating a whole new way of spending our time. According to National Review’s Rich Lowry, “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to goofing off what Henry Ford was to the automobile.” Facebook is clearly a place where a lot of people go to fight boredom. Talk radio and cable television (Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann) have become the Jerry Springer of political discourse serving up generous portions of uncivil disagreements, accusations, and arguments designed to evoke emotion. Mad Men and Downton Abby are examples of television that has excited with boredom-killing entertainment. Finally, reality television and spectator sports are for many an unfolding drama that allows people to vicariously experience conflict, elimination of players, and winner take all – or nearly all.

Notice in the examples cited, all are vicarious (or enable vicarious) rather than in person, face-to-face experiences. It is as if we have outsourced emotion. Why has the appetite for vicarious drama and excitement grown? How does it impact the challenge of marketing to elicit excitement, engagement, and interest on the part of our customers?

Clearly, the advancement of technology now allows us to experience vicariously a number of things that used to be more experiential. Everything from watching a big league baseball game, attending a movie, playing a game, to buying a book at the bookstore used to be a matter of going somewhere, often with people, to interact with other people. So much of our entertainment involved direct engagement with others. Now that has changed dramatically as increasingly our entertainment and even our purchasing and service activities can be done alone, in privacy and isolation. The meteoric rise in technology-delivered pornography is a dramatic example of a vicarious stimulus that further isolates from human interaction and real-life drama.

It is my contention that as technology has afforded more control and as we have attempted to remove some of the unpleasant and unpredictable tasks and interactions that annoy, anger, and repulse us, we have become increasingly relationally bored. In doing so, we have opted for speed, convenience, and predictability over relational engagement, drama, and excitement.

Sociologist Robert Nisbert points to boredom as a force that drives us as a species. He believes boredom is a factor in pushing us to, for example, war, murder, revolution, suicide, alcohol, narcotics, and pornography. So in addition to the positive emotions associated with relationships (love, infatuation, connection), we were also built for risk, drama, excitement, and challenge. Being in relationships with others is one of the ways we fulfill our need for stimulation. While certainly relationships can become the source for boredom when they are dull, unchanging, and predictable, they can also be source of drama and excitement – especially when there is the potential for love, sex, infidelity, break-up, big rewards, and lives lost or saved.

The more we exert control over our lives via technology and any other way possible, the greater the likelihood we stamp out excitement, drama, and the unpredictable that can be developmental and entertaining. As we have come to rely more on email, texting, on-line transactions and Google searches as primary information sources, we have increased our relational boredom. By that I mean, we are now discovering that there is something very vital in human interactions – messy, difficult, time-consuming, and painful as they are – that we now miss.  I am reminded of what the late Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson said, “One of the greatest things that happened in my life was going to prison.” What was an awful experience led him to decades of a very meaningful, relational prison ministry.

As marketers we are probably serving an ever more relationally bored marketplace. Certainly, we know of certain groups of customers, especially the elderly, who visit local offices, stores or branches often – sometimes too often – out of boredom and loneliness. And the more we move customers on-line, the less we become an instrument of relational fulfillment. As transactions replace relational interactions, the challenge for engaging, exciting, and building affinity and even commitment will only grow. Clearly, for some customers no surprises and no drama is a preferred thing, even if it doesn’t build loyalty.

But what else do we know about being plain and boring? Being plain makes it very hard to differentiate which leads to utility products, services, and relationships. Price wars, low margins, and highly competitive markets usually follow.

Boring means minds wander, people try new things, and often have bad outcomes. For parents out there we know that it often leads to trouble.  Remember that old biblical admonishment: Idleness is the devil’s workshop. To commit the marketing sin of being boring has a cost.

It may very well be that our delivery system is designed unwittingly to grow relational boredom and detachment that creates little positive buzz, customer advocacy, and few referrals. Worse, what if all of the costs we are anticipating saving by serving customers through lower cost, on-line channels is offset by advertising, lower margins, and other costs of lost customer connection, mind-share, and loyalty?

The old saying was: Advertising is the cost of being boring. Perhaps there is new saying that is more accurate: Advertising, lower customer loyalty, and lower margins are the cost of being boring. Marketers go and sin no more.