DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

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Figure 3

A recruitment flyer. It comes straight to the point in telling customers

what to do and what to think about. Reproduced by kind permission

of

Which?

.

True — technically we did command their attention (unless they opened

the mailing while distracted or daydreaming). But think about this: If you

can target with 100 percent certainty customers who buy a lot of your

product already (and it’s one of the most important items they sell to

their

customers), how hard is it going to be to get their attention?

No

t difficult, I’d say. Warburtons’ “vanmen” call on their customers

every day of the week. Their address list is enviably up to date. Reaching

the right hands is not the issue.

What

is

the issue (and I repeat) is this: When you’re designing your

communication, just for a short while suspend all thought of attention.

Start with what you want your customer to do. Confirmed time and again

by

results is my experience that marketing sells better if you make it your

priority to orientate your customer. First think navigation.

Navigation in advertising

It’s tempting to think of “advertising” as a big-budget television campaign.

In fact, television is the province of only a tiny minority of advertisers. The

STEP 1: NAVIGATION

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Figure 4

The prominent “tear-off

reply card” message reemerges 12

years later. A mailing to Warburtons’

retail customers that, at 28 percent,

quadrupled its response target and

coincided with a sales increase of over

10 percent. © Reproduced by kind

permission of Warburtons Ltd.

vast majority of ads are made for the print medium. It has been estimated

that at least 1,000 press ads are produced for every television commercial

filmed.

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And media expenditure for press is more than double that for

television.

5

So whatever your job or the scale of your business, you probably place

print ads of some sort — in trade journals,

Yellow Pages

, or perhaps in your

local newspaper. And navigation can play a key role in effective

advertising.

Of course, many ads (print or otherwise) are

direct-response

ads like

those for financial services shown in Figure 2. For me, they fall into exactly

the same category as direct mail. Unequivocally, you should show and tell

the reader what to do. Indeed, I’d argue that it is

even more

critical for a

direct-response advertisement: Compared to a mailing there’s far less

scope to use the format — the physical components — to help you commu-

nicate what to do. (I’ll talk in more detail about format in Step 2, Ease.)

Conventional advertising

It’s relatively easy to see the importance of navigation in relation to direct

marketing. Direct marketing very obviously traverses the whole of old

AIDA. By its very definition, it expects the customer to do something.

In ordinary advertising, however, the role of navigation might at first

seem more obscure. If your customer doesn’t actually have to do anything

other than register your message, where’s the need for navigation? Surely

the job of these ads is merely to get attention, create interest, and perhaps

build desire. When it’s time to shop in your category, your customer

already wants your brand. Simple.

Or not. How often have you discussed “great” ads with friends and yet

been

unable

to recall what they were for? During 2003 a television cam-

paign for a car manufacturer attracted much publicity. The ad featured

components from the car gently knocking together in a domino effect, an

idea reportedly inspired by the “Mousetrap” game. The brand of car, and

the point of the ad, were revealed at the end of an absorbing two minutes’

watching.

DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

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But today can you remember the brand? Can you remember what the

ad wanted you to know about the car? (Like why you should buy one?)

“Ah, but it doesn’t work like that... it’s subliminal... subconscious...

much more subtle” (say the experts).

The king is in the altogether (I say).

Where it isn’t appropriate to tell your customer what to do, begin

instead by telling them what to

think about

. It really amounts to the

same thing.

Even if an ad is just one small part of the longest-term, slowest-burning

campaign ever conceived, written, and produced, surely there is a point in

conditioning your customer’s mind to the message that’s coming their

wa

y? Yet in ads like the one I have described, it seems to me that naviga-

tion never even got started. And I reckon that one of the world’s most suc-

cessful communication organizations would agree with me.

Problem hair?

Some members of the creative fraternity deride what might be called the

rational Procter & Gamble approach to advertising. But at least P&G

begins its ads by telling you what to think about. And why leave it to

chance?

I don’t imagine P&G would ever expect you to sit through two minutes’

showmanship to find out why you’re paying attention. Why would you lis-

ten to someone trying to sell you something you might not want, when you

could be making a cup of tea or having a much-needed comfort break?

Most P&G ads inform you of your problem and the solution the company

offers within 8 seconds.

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I repeat: Why leave it to chance? In Step 5 I’ll talk about the importance

of selling to customers who are

already interested

in buying from us. Isn’t it

common sense to give them a clue about whom and what we represent?

Showmanship is but a poor shadow of salesmanship.

STEP 1: NAVIGATION

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Think tabloid

Do people drive you mad when they won’t come to the point? They have

some news but they won’t tell you upfront. While they hold stage as story-

teller, you’re screaming inside your head” “Just tell me where we’re going!”

(If they were an ad, you would have turned the page long ago.)

As someone who has trained myself to be impatient with communica-

tions, I love tabloid newspapers. They tell you what to think.

By this I don’t mean what

opinion

to have (though they may do that too),

but that they tell you what

you’re going to get. Right

upfront. Take a look at

Figure 5. There’s no procras-

tination, no “once upon a

time” pantomime.

Figure 5

The tabloid approach.

A typical front page telling cus-

tomers in less than a second

what they are being asked to

think about. Stars (who) flee

(what they did) palace (where)

fire (what happened). Repro-

duced by kind permission of

Ne

ws International.

Wi

th the tabloids it’s straight to the punchline every time. If

The Sun

had

been around the day the Cinderella story broke, it would have been:

“SHOE FITS: CINDERS QUEEN.” Boom.

Shoe fits: Cinders Queen. It’s all you need to know. And it’s not the lan-

guage that matters here (though short words do work better

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), it’s the reverse

storytelling technique that is so effective. You get the last line of the romance

in the headline. That’s the key information you need so you can decide in sec-

onds whether this article is something you want to devote precious minutes to.

DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

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I remember having a conversation about headlines with an editor in the

Mirror Group. He said:

“When it comes to off-the-shelf sales, I effectively have to launch a

new product every single day. If the customer can’t see at a glance

what he’s getting, he’ll pick up my competitor.”

The corollary for advertisers? Identify yourself to your customer. Tell them

what you want them to think about. They’re almost certainly interested —

so help them with the navigation.

Crazytivity

Edward de Bono invented the word “crazytivity” to describe the act of

being different just for the sake of being different (and believing that it

equals “creativity”).

It’s not difficult to find ads like this. They make me think of a salesman

in fancy dress, who says to his customer: “OK, guess what I’m trying to sell

you today?” Give me a break.

In Figure 6 overleaf is an ad (disguised) that I found in a recent edition

of

Stuff

magazine. Try to guess what it’s for. I’ve made this more difficult

by

removing all references to the product.

“Impossible!” you cry. I agree. Upfront, there are few clues to be found.

(But it was the same with the real ad.)

At

a glance, the main image is actually not that inherently interesting or

impactful, and is certainly not informative. The headline is set in a typeface

that is rather difficult to read. Added to that, it’s written as a riddle that is

quite hard to understand, never mind begin to solve.

Even taken together, the headline and the image don’t exactly

explain one another. You’d be excused for thinking that it’s something

to do with computer games. At a glance, the body copy is too small to

read (so no quick clues available there) and is made more awkward by

being set in reverse (white on black), which the eye finds

uncomfortable.

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STEP 1: NAVIGATION

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DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

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Figure 6

The risk of not telling the customer what to think about. This is a dis-

guised ad, with the same characteristics as its real counterpart. At a

glance this ad provides almost no navigation clues.

The only direct reference to the subject of the original ad —

what the

advertiser wants you to think about

— is a well-camouflaged image, a dark

object on a black background about 3cm x 3cm in real size, placed down

in a corner where the eye won’t naturally go at a glance. Even the brand

name — one of the best in the business and sure to have given the reader a

helping hand — took some finding.

I have used the expression “at a glance” several times. This is to empha-

size what for me is the key navigation issue. The averagely busy reader of

Stuff

magazine has to deal with some 50 ads and 100-odd pages packed

with endless new gadgets. If you’re placing an ad, “at a glance” is about the

most you should plan for.

Your customer is whizzing past. Sure, they’re actively searching for

information in your product category (else

I

wouldn’t be calling them your

customer and

you’d

be wasting your time trying to speak with them) — but

if they can’t tell at a glance that this

is

your product category, why would

they stop to read your ad?

Pe

rhaps viewed in the splendid isolation and time-rich environment of

the boardroom, the ad was considered to be imaginative, intriguing, and

distinctive. That’s fine. But if the boardroom isn’t the same as when cus-

tomer meets marketing, it’s a dangerous place to take your artwork.

In a simple browsing test that I use to check out points like this, the real

version of this ad got a score of under 20 percent versus an ad for a simi-

lar product placed nearby in the same magazine.

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I won’t pretend that this

method is scientific or comprehensive, but when five people understand

your competitor’s ad for every one that notices and understands your own,

I think alarm bells should begin to ring.

The lesson? If you decide on an obtuse approach to your customer, you

need to be extremely confident that your graphics and headline will stop

them in their tracks — and engage their minds.

If they don’t know what you want them to do (in this case, what to think

about), are they really going to expend valuable time trying to find out?

More likely they’ll pass you by