They never make up for lack of trust and perceived value in the mind of the consumer
Most business owners and marketers, maybe even you, have been conditioned to try to learn little advertising tricks and techniques…mainly because that’s the only thing taught in any school. I have heard many people mistakenly say ‘teach me the tricks of the trade’. This is sad because they really need to learn THE TRADE… in other words, the principles of successful advertising, rather than just learning the TRICKS. There is a good reason why all good marketing and advertising teachers go through all the principles. -Based strategies before moving on to techniques and tips.
Let me tell you that I have a big problem just teaching techniques. Let’s look at a quick story to illustrate why. My oldest son’s name is Joe and sometimes we go to the local fast food chain drive-in and buy some fries. When Joe was very young, like 2 or 3 years old, sometimes the fries would come out too hot for him to eat, so he would ask me to cool them down. Well, how do you cool down a hot potato chip when you’re in the car? You hold it against the air conditioning vent and turn it up for a few seconds until it cools down!
We call this technique the “fast food chill technique.” I know you’ve done this! Well, my son, being smarter than most (at least that’s what most parents always say, isn’t it?), he could do this technique himself, even at a very young age. Then I remember one time, I looked at Joe, and he was doing the fast food chill technique and he hadn’t told him to do it or reminded him to do it or anything. He was just doing it. And I was thinking, “Wow, he really is quite smart.” Then I took a closer look, and I actually had to do a double take. I realized that there were two problems: first, the fries weren’t hot and second, the air conditioner wasn’t even on. See, Joe was executing the technique perfectly, it’s just that the situation was totally wrong; he couldn’t understand what conditions had to exist before that technique would work. What he had was a little boy executing a technique to absolute perfection of his own without any understanding of the principles that made that technique work in the first place. He didn’t understand the principles, only the technique.
And so it is with sales techniques and marketing techniques and advertising techniques. Let me give you an example, direct mail. In the ’70s, kids started coming out teaching techniques to trick people into reading their spam. They teach how to send your sales letter in a regular sized plain white unaddressed envelope with a first class stamp and handwritten address. People would get it and say, “Wow! A letter from someone who forgot to write their return address! I wonder who that is.” Then they would open it. To do your do when you receive a white handwritten envelope with no return address? You pitch it without even opening it! You know it’s garbage. You know it’s a waste of time. But people still use that technique, like a 3 year old holding a cold potato chip in an air conditioning vent that isn’t even on!
Here’s another publicity stunt used by car dealers. They are known for using gimmicks because they have not yet innovated enough in their business to be perceived as different from their competitors. They don’t have a good internal reality, so they try to trick you into thinking they offer a better value. I won’t even talk about the loss leader trick, where they put a low-priced, stripped-down model in their ad that lures you onto the lot only to find out that model doesn’t exist. No, that’s too obvious. Everybody knows that trick. What about this one? I saw an ad with the headline “Pay no tax on all new models.” You look at that and you instantly jump to the conclusion that you won’t have to pay sales tax, which on a $25,000 vehicle could mean a savings of a couple thousand dollars. I saw it and said “Wow, that’s a great value…don’t pay taxes.” Then I saw the tiny print at the bottom of the page. It read: “Dealer will pay INVENTORY tax on vehicle, customer is responsible for all state and local sales taxes.” Now he had just bought a new car recently and remembered seeing “Inventory Tax” on the final bill. It was something like $55. Well, whoop-dee-do. At $55 savings. Nice trick, guys. Now tell me: Does that type of trick generate security and trust… or does it generate what we call contempt and hatred?
But that’s what most advertising and marketing programs teach you to do: implement a bunch of little techniques to trick people into thinking there’s some kind of value in doing business with you. Techniques, I might add, that often don’t work when you try to use them in the real world. You can’t just rely on tricks and techniques. You have to build the internal reality of your business so that the external perception has a chance to be honestly good. Hey, if your internal reality is poor, or even if it is almost equal to that of others, what do you think will be the external perception of your business? So-so at best, right? On the other hand, if you focus all your efforts on “inner reality” but can’t advertise very well, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. You’ll be pulling your hair out trying to figure out how someone could be dumb enough to do business with a competitor when your business obviously offers superior value. Well, maybe it’s NOT that obvious.
The discovery: Most companies could do better in both areas, but they struggle the most with “external perception” or, in other words, with all the competition out there, because of the trust gap, they have trouble differentiating themselves. . in the market Regardless of your situation, or where you are now, that’s what these tips are all about: improving the internal reality and the external perception of your company. It’s better to spend time talking about innovation and how to make your company competitive from a product, operations, and management standpoint, and then spend most of your time talking about how to advertise so that you actually have customers. your company as a court. especially the competitors.
Can you see why it is imperative that these two factors, internal reality and external perception, be considered at the same time? Just innovating leaves you with a really solid company that no one knows about. On the other hand, the simple act of learning sales, marketing or advertising will generate business that will not be sustained if there is no superior value. You have to consider both the inner reality and the outer perception. First you have to have something good to say and then say it well.
