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"Ten Tall Tales of Traditional Marketing That Cost You Tons"
Tall Tale #1 - Advertising Sells Products
By Jimmy Vee & Travis Miller

Advertising. We've all tried it at least once. For the purpose of this discussion, let's define advertising as any form of marketing one pays for. From business cards, flyers, and mailers to billboards, TV spots, and newspaper display ads. Advertising is everywhere. And almost every business in the world can benefit from it somehow.

The problem with advertising lies in its traditional placement in the marketing cycle. Advertising usually occurs after a product or service has been conceived, designed, implemented, and even consumed - and then only when sales aren't as expected. Advertising is generally used as a surface treatment&a marketing salve. Your product won't sell itself? Nobody's using your service? Just do a little advertising and things should turn around. Not likely.

For the last 50 years this has been the primary approach of advertisers and agencies alike. For many years it worked. But now, traditional advertising media are dying a slow death. In 1960, it was possible to reach 90% of housewives in one week by placing ads on the 3 TV networks. In 1994 the average household had less than 30 TV channels. Today, the average home enjoys more than 100. Newspaper readership is down, XFM radio technology is creeping in, the Internet has become the primary information resource for many Americans, and there are more niche magazines than ever. Market segmentation is occurring at an historical rate just as the number of marketing messages we see each day is. According to market positioning expert Jack Trout, the average American is exposed to 4,000 marketing messages per day.

So, it's harder than ever to reach a mass audience and the impact of a single advertising message is decreasing as the number of marketing interruptions per day increases. That doesn't paint a happy picture for the future of advertising. Or does it?

There is one word that fundamentally changes what advertising is, what its function in business it. I'm borrowing it from marketing guru Seth Godin, and his book "Purple Cow," which I highly recommend you read. This word is so important because it at once tells us what needs to change in advertising while at the same time tells us what advertising can do for us.

Remarkable. (Whatever you do, don't stop reading here. This may not mean what you think it does.)

That's it. In a nutshell, a company must be remarkable or it will be invisible - no matter how much advertising it does.

As we said earlier, advertising has traditionally been a post development process - applied last. But the most extraordinary advertising in the world from Madison Avenue's most famous advertising agency will struggle for results if the product, service, or company is not somehow remarkable. In today's media frenzy, that ad will hardly be seen by the masses.

What's required of companies who need to increase sales and experience new growth is not a surface treatment of "magic ad ointment." They must inject the creative, strategic, and critical thinking of advertising into their design, development, implementation, or service. By moving the primary stages of advertising up in the marketing cycle and becoming remarkable, the task of post development advertising will be much easier.

Spreading the word about a remarkable company is much more efficient than trying to convince the world that an average product is more than it actually is.

What's even better, by rearranging the marketing cycle in this way, the cost of marketing can vastly decrease.

In the next Tall Tale, we're going to swing the bat at one of ou  Go to SITEMAP