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Updated 03/08
Is this a good ad?
Every word is true.
Do the headline and picture make you want to rush out, buy a carton of Our Milk, and swig it down? Gee, why not?
Every word in your ads and brochures is
true, right? Do readers rush out and buy your
brand?
Gee, why not?
The Our
Milk poster intentionally breaks all the laws of intelligent communications. This
brief article illustrates them, using Our Milk as a case in point.
Milk is
a pure commodity. Your brand, of course, is very, very Special. Except that
there are ten other Special Brands in your category that are, from the
consumer's point of view, equally fungible.
If you apply
my method of Logical Analysis to your own brand, you will
be able to to write a solid, clear nuts &
bolts strategy, and a brand promise that is uniquely
yours.
Good strategy leads to Leap of Faith Ads. Good ads get your story across quickly to Total Strangers who were just about to buy the Other Guy's brand.
"So why can't I just run ads that look like the Other Guys'?" you ask.
You can. Most advertisers do. However, fuzzy thinking up front begets fuzzy creative begets fuzzy positioning begets, "We spent all this money on advertising and nothing happened!"
This article compresses 150 very large to very small brands worth of experience into a seven minute read. Since your phone will likely ring two or three times in the next seven minutes, you might want to [Ctrl + P] print this page for review later on. Oh, there's a
Pop Quiz at the end,
so read carefully.
________________
Step
One. Seven
Simple Questions.
The Marketing Communication Process begins with
the truth. Answer these questions thoughtfully and objectively. Try to think like a normal human being who neither knows nor cares much about your brand, your company, or you.
1: Who Do You Want?
2: What Do They Want?
3: Why Are You Different?
4: So What?
5: Yeah, but... Why Not?
6: What are the Other Guys Doing?
7: Who's Counting What?
1. Who Do You Want?
 Obviously you want people who drink milk or whatever it is you
sell. You know the standard demographics - age, income, gender,
etc. Now dig a little deeper.
Think about
the last few dozen people you did business with. What do they have in
common? Were they upbeat, intelligent, stylish, decision-makers, good
credit risks, health-conscious fitness buffs? Or were they lazy,
low-brow, dowdy, timid, penny- pinching, overweight slobs?
The point is,
your brand may appeal to people who share a personality profile. You
want your ads to appeal to people like them.
Now think about the
last dozen or so people who either turned you down, or who you turned
down. Same routine. Be specific. You do NOT want your ads to attract people
you do NOT want. Don't let this
happen to
you!
Look at the stock
photos of the lady drinking milk. How would you describe her
personality? Active, on-the-go, health-conscious? Anything
else? Look again. The Marketing Communication Process is not
all words.
2. What Do They Want?
If you
remember anything in this exercise, remember this:
New Customers expend more
emotional energy the first time they
buy your brand than do your current customers, your sales force, or you.
 To you
and the rest of the crew, it's business as usual. More widgets. To them it's a Whole New
Thing.
Now try
to imagine what it's like to buy and taste Our Milk or use Your Thing for the
very first time. What's going through that lady's mind at this very second?
First clue:
She is NOT
thinking about your company, your sales goals, your quarterly
EBITA, your ingredients, engineering specifications, or independent test
results.
Second clue:
Just a moment ago she was thinking about her job, her children, that leaky
gutter, where to go on
vacation, those extra five pounds, ("Boy, am I thirsty!"), did she pick up the dry
cleaning...
Somewhere in the Daily Blizzard there may be a brief
moment when your prospects need something like Your Thing. Is there a specific problem your
prospects are trying to solve? Do most people buy The Same Old Brand every time? How many people bounce from brand to brand?
The Steam Principle
is a one-page read on When people buy your brands and how you can improve your
timing. Scan it and return.
3. Why Are
You Different?
Most people don't care why you're the same as the
brand they use now. The brain processes differences faster than similarities.
Do you notice any differences between the first two photos above and the picture on the right?
People expect Our Milk to be
"white, cold, fresh, and from cows." Perhaps your cows do feed on hydroponic
hay, though. Maybe you come in plasti-glass containers as well as cardboard cartons.
Maybe you cost a dime less. What else?
Write down any and all rational objective differences between you and the
Other Guys. Could be price,
terms, location, product design &
performance, customer service & satisfaction, quality of staff, or proven
results. Differences! Not similarities.
Our Milk cannot be uniquely white, cold, fresh,
or from cows. Your brand cannot be uniquely generic either. It can be uniquely.... what?
4. So What?
 Does hydroponic hay make Our
Milk sweeter? Maybe. If not, it's a difference without a distinction. How
about that plasti-glass container? Could a packaging difference possibly benefit anyone? Who?
Write down how each of your real differences benefit your
customers. Do any of those differences solve any common customer
problems better than your competitors?
Is there one difference that solves one very important
problem?
If your ONLY difference is price
you might be tempted to talk about how saving money benefits your
prospects. That's lazy thinking. Economy is its own reward. Low price may well be a disadvantage if
people think that cheaper = lower quality. What low-cost difference can you add
to a commodity to make it appear more valuable than the asking price?
Look at the four photos
again. Look for a problem Our Milk could solve.
5. Yeah, but... Why Not?
You can give
prospects ten good reasons to try your brand.
They only need one lousy excuse
not to. 
Most people are intellectually intrigued by anything new, but
they emotionally resist change. They fear the unknown, confuse you with your
competitors, or reach down into deep memory for some excuse why your brand
won't work for them.
Very often your sales force or telemarketers
will hear the same old "Yeah, buts..." over and over again. Ask
them! Run a no-cost Brand Resistance Survey in-house. Run some focus groups or do some Problem
Detection Research. (100 Points extra credit for clicking either
link.)
Some
objections seem insurmountable. The lady to the right won't be in the market for "Our Milk" for several months no matter what we do or say. Some objections are easier to fix. For example, a milk bottle is easier to
swig
from than a carton, but lots of people might object to sharing
their milk with anyone else.
If you can identify the most
common "Yeah, buts..." up front and defuse them in the ads, you'll be amazed at the
results. Click to Id-Positioning for examples.
6. What Are The Other Guys Doing?
A blueprint for rigorous competitive analysis is beyond the scope of this article. However, here's an exercise conducted by Very Very Large Agencies that you can perform in the privacy of your own boardroom. It'll take about an hour and pay a rich return on your
investment of time & effort. Pin your competitors' ads up on the wall.  Put the biggest companies at one end and the smallest at the other. Now stand back
look at the array. What do see? Do the leaders look better than or about the same as the little guys?
Who looks safe? Who looks hot? Does anyone stand out? Who do you look like? Write down the graphic or stylistic elements they all share. Examples: Car dealer ads are full of giant starbursts. Perfume ads usually use romantic
photos. Indigestion ads use humor. Does everyone imitate everyone else? Does anyone imitate you?  Next, write down the bare-bones message for each player in the
category. Who are they talking to? What are they trying to say? Why are they different, etc.?
What do you think is the correlation between style, message, and sales rank?
Point to the spot
on the wall where you are today in terms of sales. Do your ads look like your immediate competitors? Point to where you want to be in a year to 18 months. That's what you have to look like to get there. Capiche?
7.
Who's Counting What?
 How will you measure and track the effectiveness of the communications?
The
final score is net Earnings Before Income Taxes. Sort of.
Somewhere in between setting a marketing budget, buying airtime and paying
dividends, you'll have to count phone calls, clicks,
coupons, homepage hits, Overnight Recall Scores, store traffic, etc. Who will respond or react first? Who will take their own sweet time? How should the style of the advertising match the Personality Profiles of your most likely new and repeat customers over time? When the ads run,
how fast do you expect to see results? What's the natural Response Acceleration Rate of your brand? How you convert initial response to actual sales is, of course, a whole 'nuther story.
_____________
Congratulations !
You just got through the
hard part.
The rest is easy.
_____________
Step Two: The Brand
Promise
 Truthful Answers to the seven questions above might
fill half a page with scribbles or several ring binders with data. The
next step is to focus your logical analysis into a short succinct Brand
Promise.
Something on the order of: "If
you are (WHO YOU WANT), who (WHAT THEY WANT), now you can (BENEFIT),
because of (DIFFERENCE) and (DEFUSE OBJECTION)."
The shorter the better, but if you need a paragraph, write one. A brand promise is a contract between you and your customers.
It's not a tag line,
or a block of copy stuck at the end of the ads. It's more like the
recipe for Ultimate Sprinkle Glazed Donuts. Ads are the donuts.
A Brand Promise for Our Milk
could run something like this:
"If
you're an active, on-the-go, health-conscious person and don't always have the time to pour and enjoy a
whole glass of milk or don't like to drink from cardboard boxes, now you can get
instant refreshment drinking right from
our plasti-glass containers that are now color coded
so everyone can keep track of his or her own bottle of Our Milk."
Simple
eh?
(For what it's worth, Publix Supermarkets recently added 1-quart plastic, screw top, small-mouth, swiggable milk bottles to the dairy section. Maybe someone in Lakeland, FL read this article!)
Now write a
Brand Promise for Your Thing. Crib the style from mine if you
like. Cover all the bases.
Extra Credit: A
good exercise is to write six or seven possible promises, then mull over the pros
and cons of each. Excise the unnecessary. Extract the extraordinary.
EXAMPLE:
I recently devised a total branding campaign for a luxury high rise
condominium to be constructed right on the river near the drab, dreary, almost-deserted,
and long- neglected downtown area of a SW Florida city. The Strategic
Review for that
project is a good model for your next effort. It includes a half dozen plausible Brand Promises, of which one bubbled logically to the top.
With a
little effort, you can probably write a terrific copy platform that will help make
your ads stand out. Remember, your competition is all those other guys who are
happy to rattle off why they're the same as everyone else.
Step Three:
The Leap of
Faith
It's time to
bake the donuts.
Your strategy
and brand promise are the recipe part of the marketing
communications process. Making ads is part inspiration,
part chemistry. There's really no way to teach creativity,
or even judge it objectively. Here are a few things to keep in mind,
though.
§ A simple execution of a solid
promise usually works better than an artsy production number about nothing. §
Scream
loudly if you want to be heard by the Dumb & Poor. Speak softly if
you covet the Smart & Rich. §
If your prospects share a common language, lingo, argot, patois, or
arcane technical vocabulary - use it, and use it correctly. §
Don't
imitate the style of your competitors' ads unless you can outspend them
heavily. People will think you are the
other guys. §
Solve problems. Feature-benefit ads are OK, but don't expect people to read lists of bullet points looking for the one or two that appeal to them. Nobody cares how you
make the milk.
For more tips on making good creative, click here.
POP QUIZ!
Here's where you get to prove (to yourself anyway) how easy it is to whip off great ads. Go back and read that Brand Promise for Our Milk. Now write one simple Outdoor Board - headline and picture only - that makes people
whizzing by at 65 MPH want to get off at the next exit and rush to the nearest
7-11.
Easy,
huh? Come on, one picture, one line!
Two second read.
How
hard can it be?
OK, here are Six.
"Yeah,
but...Why Me?"
"Gee, this sounds like a lot of work. Can't I just write something clever
about my product? It's only advertising."
Actually, it's only money. Your media budget, to be precise. How
much of it do you want to throw away? Half? Two-thirds? All
of it?
People
see about 2,000 ads, emails, and banners a day. They ignore ads about
things that are NOT on their mind. They pay little attention to
"Me-too!" blather. Even if they enjoy your cleverness, they
instinctively resist Doing Anything New that upsets the status quo - just as
you're doing right now. 
During the past few minutes you've learned a method of thinking you
can apply to any product or service, from a simple commodity like milk to a
complex brand like heath insurance or an IT
recruitment website. The more detailed
your answers to those seven simple questions and the tighter your brand promise, the
better.
I
will leave you with a priceless comment by the late Bill Bernbach, founder of
(the also late) Doyle, Dane, Bernbach:
"It is
perfectly reasonable to suspend a man by his ankles and shake him vigorously
if the purpose of the advertising is to demonstrate that his trousers are made
with pockets specially designed to prevent the escape of loose change."
Strategy
Made Simple.
Maybe you don't want to bother with "the marketing communication process." Maybe you just want
your ads to do something fast. Send me
your thoughts via email.
Or
do what you want your own prospects to do. Pick up the phone.
407 895 3092
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