Step 1: The idea comes first

No matter how wonderfully creative and entertaining your marketing or advertising, if you don't give your prospect the real reason to buy, it won't work. What makes marketing work is a specific selling message told in a novel way from the prospect's point of view.

Witness Nissan's 1990's era "Enjoy the Ride" campaign...a beautifully executed and expensive campaign that won lots of awards, yet netted Nissan a thirty percent drop in sales for all the money it spent. What their "marketing" forgot to do is sell something of value, to put the prospect in the car - at least in her mind.

After all, ask somebody to part with her hard-earned money, and she wants to know, what for? What do I get out of it? Just as you do cost-benefit analyses when you're about to make capital expenditures, each of us as consumers makes the very same analysis whenever we make a purchase (many times in a matter of nano-seconds). Are you making sure your marketing communication makes the prospect see him or herself enjoying the benefits of your product or service?

Before we start the show...

You need to keep in mind a few very important points - not the least of which is, that when it comes right down to it, your customer cares not a wit about you or your company.

In people's priority lists of what they need to do every day, eating, sleeping and keeping a roof over their heads are generally at the top of the list, while worrying about your problems is pretty near the bottom. Except, of course, when they're in the market for the thing you sell. Then they start to worry. Well, not so much about you, but what you can do for them. You can help make sure it's you in particular they think of as the place to find the solution to their problems - if you've been giving them a steady diet about how you can help them well in advance of their entering the market.

Point two: Advertising is not another word for marketing

Secondly, marketing and advertising are not the same thing. Advertising is a marketing activity. Advertising is what you do when you can't speak to all of your prospects directly. Advertising is merely a place where the buying-selling process begins (note we said "a" place, not "the" place). What advertising does is tell your marketing story to large numbers of people at a time, rather than having to, say, go door to door talking to them one at a time. That is to say, it multiplies your selling efforts. Advertising's job is to cogently make the offer, make the promise, and attract prospects to your doorstep by allowing them to see themselves enjoying the benefits of your product or service. But let's be clear: Advertising is not your marketing. Advertising is simply an expression of it. Advertising is the last step in designing and implementing your marketing, even though, perhaps paradoxically, it's usually the first step in making customers aware of you. (Having said that, if you'd like to hear some killer radio advertising, see our radio portfolio.

Of course, all this presumes that you've got a good business to begin with; that you're equipped to handle the orders; that you can fulfill the promise you make; that you provide products or services of such desirability and quality that people are willing to part with their money in the first place. The greatest ad campaign ever created can't save a business that's dying because it's run badly, treats its customers poorly and commits other similar sins. The most advertising can really do is persuade people to give it (your product or service) a try. After that, it's up to you to turn them into paying customers who keep coming back for more.

Point three: What do you mean, "change my mind"?

Third, once people's minds are made up, it's nigh on to impossible to change them. This is why you want to employ Zig Ziglar's tactic of not trying to get people to change their decisions, but "give them new information upon which [they] can make a new decision." That is to say, design all of your marketing messages so that you're presenting new information (or at least information in a new light), so that to your prospect does not have to be "convinced" to change his mind (meaning, dissuaded from his current point of view), but can simply make it up in the first place. It was John Kenneth Galbraith who said, "Faced with a choice of changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."

Point four: Do you know what you're selling? Well, do you?

Finally, you must also truly and thoroughly understand what you're selling, which is to say it's not necessarily the physical stuff. People only buy one thing: a solution to a problem. And any unmet need is a problem. (By the way, there's no such thing as a "want." There's only need: "But you don't understand! I NEED a red Corvette!") There's an old advertising adage that goes something like: People don't buy drills because they want drills. They buy drills because they want holes. People make purchases because the product or service in their minds fulfills some need, that is, solves some problem. They then create the logic and rationalization in order to justify the purchase. Want proof? Go to any street corner where there's more than one gas station. The station that's selling gas for ten cents a gallon more than the one across the street can have as many cars at its pumps as the others. How can that be? Logic should dictate that, all things being equal, the only gas one need buy (and the only gas that should be selling) is the lowest priced gas.

But all things aren't equal

Hey, this one's better quality. (Is it? How to you know? Are you a chemist?) It was on my side of the street (thereby filling an emotional need for convenience or perhaps safety). They've got those electronic do-hickey things that I just have to wave at the pump; There are fewer turns; I don't have to fight as much traffic.

(This gas station example, by the way, demonstrates another important point. Namely, price isn't the only, or perhaps even the primary consideration in making purchase decisions. If one truly understands what the prospect is actually buying, and keeps that need/solution in front of him, then the seller can force the price issue down (ideally to the bottom of) the consideration priority list, because you've shown that your product or service is the one that best fills the need. If you make people want yours badly enough, they'll pay almost anything to get it...well, up to a point.