The title of this post is a quote from Warren Buffett, and industrial suppliers would do well to take heed. When I was selling machine tools (before I got into advertising), I thought advertising didn't work. Advertising was transparent manipulation that could only fool stupid people. Smart people would never rely on such an obviously biased source for information of any kind. I'm smart (I thought) and my clients are smart, so advertising has no role in industrial equipment sales. I guess my model of the world involved me and some friends sitting at the top of a tower in flowing robes and pointy hats looking down with disdain at the drooling masses below.
My bosses were not too far off this position. They knew they were supposed to advertise, according to Accepted Business Practice, but they had severe doubts about its effectiveness. The only justification for advertising they found even partly persuasive was, since everyone is doing it, your company will look weak if it does not. They advertised when they felt they had "extra" money to do so, and it was the first thing on the block as soon as things got tight, which they frequently did. As it happens, this was precisely the opposite of the right thing to do.
When I got into advertising and did some reading on the field, I often ran across the assertion that advertising always works on everyone if it is properly executed. At first I scoffed at the idea that advertising worked on me. Then, one day, I caught myself drooling over an ad for a new video game and clicking on the link. "But that doesn't count," I thought, "because I like video games and want to buy them already." Then the penny dropped. I was in the target market for the video game developer and its well-designed ad campaign had shown me a message I found interesting through a channel I was paying attention to. Most of the advertising I sneered at was not directed at me at all — of course I found it irrelevant and manipulative. I don't buy fabric softener so any message attempting to interest me in a fabric softener is going to utterly fail to persuade me and actively annoy me in the attempt. Most of the advertising I had seen in my life had missed me in this fashion because I was in my early 30s and only recently entering a phase of life where I had any money. The bulk of advertising at that time was still aimed at Baby Boomers; the shift in focus to 18 - 35 was just beginning. I had the wrong idea about advertising. I thought every ad was trying to sell to everyone, therefore an ad failed to the extent that it failed to sell me. Since most ads people see fail to sell them, advertising as an industry must be a scam.
That was just youthful self-centeredness and ignorance of the way advertising really works. But there is a another reason why people, especially industrial suppliers, are skeptical about advertising's effectiveness; there is a great deal of bad advertising out there.
Remember what I said about the ad that worked on me being properly targeted? And delivered through a channel to which I was paying attention? And conveying a compelling message? Industrial advertising usually fails in at least one of these three elements.
The targeting is usually not bad; industrial suppliers know enough to avoid blowing money on ad placements that will not reach their clients, though sometimes I wonder if they could be more creative in finding channels that will reach their clients where their clients aren't expecting it. Could local TV in industry-heavy areas work? Don't know, no one has ever tried it, to my knowledge.
The advertising channels for industrial suppliers are weak in terms of arresting audience attention. I wrote in my last post about the failings of trade media and I don't need to rehash it here. An engineer friend was telling me on the weekend that there is simply nowhere for him to go to get a comprehensive look at all the industrial suppliers out there with details of what they carry. How, in the Information Age, in a sector that probably uses the internet more than anyone, is this possible?
While the channels may be weak, they are there, which brings us to probably the most common downfall of industrial advertising: execution. Industrial advertising is so mind-numbingly boring, it is a miracle anyone is able to pay attention to it long enough to finish producing it. Pictures of the product often dominate the ad — why? You can't tell much about how a piece of machinery or a tool performs from a picture, and every competitor is running attractive-looking pictures, too. The ad often neglects to say why someone might want to buy the product. Claiming you are the biggest and best is just chest-thumping and the advertiser speaking to himself, a message that can become comical when it appears in something less than a full-page ad. Claiming the product is high-quality is an unnecessary step back from the actual benefit. Will it last longer? How much longer? If you can't say, then how can you make the quality claim? An even better question is, why bother? Everyone else is doing it and if you believed everything you read in a trade magazine, every single advertiser has the highest quality in the industry. What if you ran an ad saying, "Our machine will make a million widgets per hour, guaranteed"? Would this attract more or less interest than an ad saying "Our machine is really great"? These are very basic, fundamental principles of ad writing, but they are violated all the time in industrial advertising. Industrial suppliers might as well take the money they spend producing and placing most of their ads and flush it down the toilet for all the good it is doing them.
Of course, they have a sense of this, which is why they are skeptical about advertising. But the answer is exactly the opposite of the typical response. Retreating from advertising just leaves the field to companies who understand it. The answer is to actually spend a decent amount of money on ad creative, getting professional help to do so. Yes, I have a dog in this fight, but you can go ask Warren Buffett or any professor at any business school if you don't believe me. Then companies actually have to spend money on a sustained ad campaign, not one placement. Ad spending should go up as sales go down, not the reverse. Ad spending exists to drive demand and create sales; why on Earth would a company take away a sales-generation tool right when it needs sales the most? Spending money that isn't in the bank account is why credit exists. Companies that are afraid to go into debt to reverse a decline in sales will soon be dead from lack of sales anyway. Might as well hang for a pound as a penny.
No comments:
Post a Comment