Sunday 28 November 2010

How to over think your advertising

It is said that advertising is the greatest waste of human intellect, second only to chess.

Which brings neatly on to messaging architectures. What on earth are they? The output is invariably a powerpoint slide with all the messages a brand wants it customers to understand about itself or its products. The polite expression is assumptive.

It assumes consumers are interested. It sometimes assumes that consumers are so fascinated by a brand that they are happy to consume and process the messages in the order a brand wants them to do. They are like all a lot of plans, extremely seductive on paper but invariably useless when you get to implement anything. Their main purpose is to show everyone else we have thought of everything unfortunately they have a major negative effect. They encourage you to focus on the Ts & Cs, the additional points not necessarily the interesting bit.

A wise person said the job of marketing and advertising is to find something interesting about your product and then say it in an interesting way. When you invite someone round to a party. You say it is going to be brilliant we will get obscenely drunk/play whist - depending on your age. You don't send out an agenda with details of what to do with your coats and drinks when you arrive. Maybe you do. Sorry.

5 comments:

  1. Sorry, but what is the point of this article?
    Also the advice of the wise person at the end... a no brainer...

    Steffen

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  2. This seems to be very philosophic, but I think that it won't help me in my everyday work.

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  3. Its a fantastic Blog,Multicultural Marketing strategies, as an increasingly popular aspect of company sales, are widely used by major U.S. corporations to increase customer loyalty and brand identification.

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  4. cool blog :)
    i don't really get the main point of this post, but it's still a good thought! i think people won't admit it, but they are happy that advertising is helping them to develop their personality, 'cause people indentify themselves with brands.

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  5. The point is that advertising (and planners) should avoid trying to cram in everything they know about the product and the consumer and just say the one most important thing very well.

    A lot of ads simply list product features - which is a bit like going to a job interview wearing every tie you possess.

    ReplyDelete

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Just curious about marketing, psychology, economics, business, irrational behaviour, people, models, communications, advertising, market imperfections, b2b marketing. I work in the marketing communications industry for OgilvyOne.