I've recently been reading about Goal Theory in education and it's made me ponder some of the recent new media promotions that have been around recently.
It seems people tend to fall into two categories when approaching tasks. There is the Performance group, who want to complete a task to show how talented they are and the Mastery group, who want to gain the skills from completing the task.
What's interesting is how this effects motivation for tasks. The Performance group will be highly motivated for short tasks that they know they'll be good at, but they will quickly lose interest if they struggle, or do not receive praise/recognition.
The Mastery group on the other hand are more motivated by tasks with deeper engagement, that offer them new skills for their hard work.
So here's the advertising bit.
I'm sure I've stated several times before on this blog that I'm not a fan of the 'design a video/ad for our brand' promotions. They look to get people to engage with the brand for a long period of time, but then they only seem to offer any reward for the one winner, who probably already knew they had the skills to win the competition.
Most of them play to the Performance orientated audience, but this leaves the talented winner of the competition happy, while the others gave up long before because they weren't getting a reward.
This doesn't seem like a great way of getting consumers to spend a long period of time engaged with your brand.
I feel the best forms of interactive advertising are those that appeal to both the Mastery and Performance groups, in that they celebrate the best, while offering self improvement to all those who enter. I suppose the best example of this is the Nike + work and I think this kind of work that rewards all who take part is by far the best way of getting genuine long term engagement, not just a few YouTube uploads for the novelty of it.
