Here are fifteen advertising rules to remember.
- Teaser ads are worthless. A teaser ad is an ad, usually one of a series, which alludes to a forthcoming product. The teaser ad does not tell the customer the product or the brand. No one cares about the tease. No one is breathlessly waiting for the surprise. No one anticipates the product. No one. Customers are too busy to care. Customers see through the artifice. Customers want advertisers to get to the point. Teasers ads are a complete waste of money. (“Coming soon” ads are not teaser ads; they are announcement ads, announcing a product, movie, or event, and they are fine.)
- Serve hot food hot and cold food cold. That’s the promise. That’s the expectation.
- Channels are not customers. Channels, such as distributors and retailers, are where customers go to buy products.
- Know how exactly your company makes money. And know which products, no matter how old, make the money. Products that make money are products customers like and buy. Pour the coals to the products that ring the cash register.
- There is always a cost-to-cost cutting. Know what the resultant cost is in your organization.
- Put selling on a pedestal, not the sales force. Salespeople are critical. Great salespeople are invaluable. A rainmaker, a great salesperson, can go upon a pedestal temporarily. But not the sales force. The sales force doesn’t call the shots. Marketing calls the shots.
- If an ad doesn’t sell, if it doesn’t ultimately ring the cash register, it is a waste of money.
- So-called image ads are a waste of money if they don’t sell. Don’t run image ads. Run ads that sell your b product. Ads that sell create a positive image.
- Superstars firmly believe that if a customer does not do business with the superstar, then both lose.
- The end of an event is remembered than the beginning. Always end your customer’s experience so that the customer oversatisfied, if not thrilled.
- Sell the wine, not the winemaker. If the customer believes that product quality depends on the winemaker, the chef, or the Snapple Lady, and that persona goes to the vineyard in the sky, the customer may desert.
- Make the customers invest in something into the sales and purchase process. Get them to taste a sample; to try the product; to take the pen (as offered by the salesperson). Customers who invest buy sooner and more often than customers who don’t.
- Replace the old advertising maxim of having a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) with having a Dollarized Selling Proposition.
- Be like the workers in the television bar Cheers. Customers go to Cheers because, as the theme song notes, Cheers is “where everybody knows your name”. Customers prefer to do business with people who remember their names rather than people who don’t.
- Mission statements must be expressed in picture words. Mission statements must be marketing mission statements. They must be expressed in galvanizing but commonplace words, not in corporate-speak. For example, note Winston Churchill’s famous mission statement “Bomb the bridges and be back safely by dawn.” Or the personal computer company that works to “Put a computer in every classroom, in every household.”
