INTRODUCTION Putting the salesmanship back into marketing

Putting the salesmanship back into marketing

W

hether you run a small business or a big corporation (or work

somewhere in between), you probably get involved with mar-

keting communications. This could mean ads, brochures, dis-

play cards, leaflets, mailings, on-pack offers, posters, sales presenters,

websites... or simply “marketing” for short.

And like most people, you probably wonder if your marketing sells. I

expect you’re not 100 percent sure, even if you employ a specialist adver-

tising, design, or promotional agency to help you. In fact, I bet you’re not

even 50 percent sure.

Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Lord Leverhulme, founder of

Lever Bros, famously said:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is

I don’t know which half.”

1

In fact it can be more serious than that. John Caples, one of the pioneers

of “scientific advertising” in the US, cited a campaign in which one head-

line created

19

2

times

more response than an otherwise identical ad.

2

The missing ingredient

So why does one piece of marketing succeed where another fails? What is

it that causes almost 20 times as many people to respond to one message

than to another? Just how

do

you make your marketing sell?

In my experience, there’s a paradox. What well-intentioned marketers

think

they should do to make their marketing sell often doesn’t work. And

that’s because they get salesmanship confused with showmanship.

Salesmanship is the missing ingredient in making your marketing sell.

What I mean by salesmanship — and you may be relieved to hear this —

are the quiet skills of empathy and perception. These are skills that are so

often abandoned in modern marketing communications. This book is all

about how to put them back.

But what do I know?

I was immediately struck by the lack of salesmanship in marketing com-

munications when I started my first classical marketing job. (I became a

product manager launching a new brand of bathroom tissue.) Having

spent the previous six years working in sales and sales training, I suppose

I was well placed to note the contrast. I’ve since been reassured to discover

that many of history’s most feted and successful advertising copywriters,

including greats such as Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy, started out life

treading the streets as lowly salesmen. Perhaps this is no coincidence?

For my own rather more modest part, I was astonished by the general

lack of urgency, or even interest, shown by the professional marketing

community toward selling. By this I mean that nobody seemed able to tell

me, then a relative novice in the art of ad making, how the ads actually

wo

rked. Even people in my advertising agency — one of the grandest in

London at the time — were puzzled that I should pose the question.

I was determined not to accept this state of affairs. But despite working

for some of the world’s biggest companies and best-known brands, and

studying in my spare time for an MBA specializing in marketing communi-

cations, I never found an easy helping hand. At work there was lots of “what

we

did” (but not “why we did it”) and at college there was lots of theory (but

not how to apply it). It seemed that practitioners were too busy and aca-

demics too detached. The result: Marketing does not sell like it could.

So my quest has been for a simple understanding. For 25 years now I’ve

collected marketing tips, scoured textbooks, attended courses and semi-

nars, and picked the brains of anyone who appeared to understand what

makes for good communication. I gained invaluable practical experience

wo

rking in marketing for firms such as Kimberly-Clark and Cadbury

Schweppes, where I did my share of television advertising, and for Lloyds

bank (now Lloyds TSB), where I ran a direct marketing operation. I also

spent a couple of years as a director of the sales promotion agency Clarke-

DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

2

As my former marketing professor — one of the world’s leading academic

marketers — puts it:

“It is necessary to recognise that AIDA and its kin will remain the

implicit conceptual underpinnings of present-day practice until

marketing academics are able to produce a better model which prac-

titioners can understand and are willing to use.”

18

I couldn’t agree more... but does it work? In my experience — and here’s

the strange thing — not really. Leastways, it’s not how you smash the indus-

try norm.

The trouble with AIDA

While this book is about

all

types of marketing communications, about a

fifth of the case studies concern examples of direct marketing. (That hap-

pens to be roughly in line with its share of overall marketing expenditure.)

Direct marketing is a growing discipline and a valuable tool for marketers

wishing to understand their work: in less than a week you usually know

if your mailing has been a success. Indeed, for an office-based marketer

it’s a heaven-sent opportunity, because it can teach you to think like a

salesman.

Direct marketing is renowned for its formulas — things you should

always do to maximize response, like putting a PS at the end of the letter.

In the mid-1980s I went on a course for copywriters.

19

It was run by two of

the leading direct marketing practitioners of the time. I still have the hand-

outs and notes, and here’s an extract:

“The letter is the most important part of your mailing. This is where

you should spend most of your creative time. You’ll spend it prof-

itably by using the magic formula AIDA.”

A decade later I sat down to write a direct marketing module for our own

graduate training program. Its purpose was to teach our trainees how to

INTRODUCTION

5

create an effective basic mailing, or how to evaluate one already produced. By

then, I’d worked on hundreds of mailings and felt pretty confident that I had

some useful ideas of my own to impart, even though I’d never committed

them to paper. Nevertheless, I turned first to AIDA to provide a structure.

OK, I thought, let’s start with A for “attention.” I got my layout pad and

pens ready, and after a few minutes of scribbling and sketching... well,

despite my best intentions, “attention” was not putting in an appearance.

And no matter how hard I tried, I could not get AIDA to fit with the point

at which I wanted to begin. AIDA did not match practical selling reality.

When customer meets marketing

As I struggled to find the right words to start the training module, I had of

course revisited my own golden rule: Explain why it will work, or else.

Why?

Why will it influence my customer to respond or to buy? Unless I

could answer why, my training sessions would be of little value.

Look at it the other way for a moment and ask: Why do so many mar-

keting communications fail? The most frequent answer in my experience

is quite simply because the recipient — your customer — can’t work out

what’s going on. For some reason, marketers forget to explain who they

are, and what they are asking for, in an intelligible manner.

This basic, common courtesy has little to do with attention, or interest,

or desire, or action. It’s a simple acknowledgment that a customer’s mind

wo

n’t shift out of first gear until it knows where it’s going and how to get

there. All too often, when customer meets marketing, the marketer’s gone

missing.

I believe that every successful marketing communication needs a

kind of “guardian salesman.” (I don’t mean somebody hawking the

eponymous newspaper, but someone more like the invisible characters

in

City of Angels

.) Of course, if you’re the marketer, it’s your job to act

the angel.

This involves some simple mental projection. Picture the moment when

your customer meets your marketing. Then watch and listen as the imagi-

nary interaction takes place.

DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?

6

The first thing you should notice is that AIDA isn’t what happens.

Indeed, when I finally completed the first draft of my training module, I

realized I had come up with the sequence S–W–E–A–R,

20

so for a while we

had a subject called SWEARing on the graduate training schedule! This

caused some amusement in the agency, but I couldn’t see it catching on.

So I revisited AIDA.

NEW AIDA™

AIDA shares with its fellow models of buying behavior a common goal: to

represent the process when a customer receives a marketing message and

reacts to it. AIDA is simple to grasp and worthy in its intentions. And for

many people it’s a familiar and user-friendly framework.

The best thing about applying AIDA to your marketing is that it

makes you think about selling. The worst thing is that it isn’t how to

sell. My approach, therefore, is a compromise, which I call NEW AIDA

— you could say it’s the guardian salesman’s version. It’s based on the

century-old formula, but subtly adjusted in a way that releases its

extraordinary selling potential. It puts the salesmanship back into

marketing.

Size doesn’t matter

As I’ve indicated, much of my experience has been with major multi-

nationals, both as an employee and as a provider of creative services. My

own marketing communications firm was named The Blue-Chip

Marketing Consultancy to indicate the type of blue-chip client it was

created to serve. In consequence, much of our work was played out on a

national and indeed international stage, for some of the world’s best-

known brands and companies. Literally millions of consumers responded

to our campaigns, across some 15 countries.

21

However, my agency was never large (we grew to three offices and

about fifty staff), nor are its present-day incarnations. This meant that we

we

re able to try out theories and ideas on a small scale, as part of our own

INTRODUCTION

7

marketing communications program. For instance, for about a decade we

sent out a bi-monthly mailing to our client and contacts database (between

250 and 1,000 letters or packages at a time), testing different types of

propositions, offers, writing styles, and response mechanisms. The endur-

ing lesson for me was that things that worked on a modest scale subse-

quently worked on a grand scale — it’s no surprise really, but something

that helps you keep your feet on the ground.

So if you’re reading this book from the perspective of a smaller organi-

zation — perhaps even your own one-person business — you can be reas-

sured on two fronts. First, the principles have what you might call

blue-chip credentials (it’s the way big blue-chip firms do their marketing).

Second, they should work for you, however small your operation.

For instance, not long ago my uncle Bill asked me to look at a mailing

on behalf of one of his friends who was trying to start up an online racing

tips service.

22

It was just a cottage enterprise, although the chap in question

was a highly successful professional tipster. His problem was recruiting

punters to subscribe in the first instance. The initial mailing of 750 had

generated only a handful of replies (under 1 percent), even though the list

was up to date and comprised serious gamblers. I thought that the copy

was well written and contained a strong no-obligation offer, but it was

immediately apparent to me why it wasn’t working.

Wi

th just a few tweaks, the second mailing produced a 7.5 percent

response — more than enough to take the business past its breakeven tar-

get. How come? Basically I changed what the customer saw

first

and

thought about

first

, without really changing any of the content. This is the

starting point for NEW AIDA: N for

Navigation

.