Category: Portland marketing

Marketing Advice from the Attorney General

I spent four hours on Monday in a seminar about the new Oregon Administrative Rules on advertising and consumer fraud. Not exactly the most riveting topic, but in 20+ years of doing this, none of my clients has ever gone to jail because of advice I gave, and I aim to keep it that way.

During the seminar, Senior Assistant Attorney General Eugene Ebersole quoted his boss, Oregon AG Hardy Myers, on the subject of deceptive advertising and disclaimers:

“Don’t scream a lie and then whisper the truth.”

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Tapping into Consumer Anxiety

Perry Marshall likes to say that the object of marketing is to enter the conversation that the prospect is already having in his or her head. A great example of this is featured in the New York Times this weekend.

The item in question is called LENA (for “language environment analysis”). If you’re the parent of a young child and are wondering if your child’s language skills are progressing at an appropriate rate, this $400 device promises to answer the question.

The Times describes the inspiration for the device this way:

The man behind the vision, Infoture’s founder, Terrance Paul, has made a fortune selling software to assess children’s reading skills. His current venture was inspired by a well-known 1995 study that found that professional parents uttered more than three times as many words to their children as did parents who were on welfare. The children in the less talkative homes turned out to be less verbal and to have smaller vocabularies. Other studies have suggested that these gaps affect later professional success.

One way to close the language gap, Paul reasoned, would be to make early assessments of a child’s language world. Parents, he figured, could use the feedback to intervene and enrich their kids’ verbal environment as needed.

There would appear to be two markets for this — parents with legitimate worries about their kids’ development, and competitive parents looking for any edge they can get to give their children a head start in life. Both sets are wondering the same thing — “What’s really going on in my child’s mind?”

Whether LENA turns out to be an effective early-warning tool or just a source of unnecessary stress (The article points out that “some linguists worry that the technology is more likely to raise false anxieties than to assuage genuine ones,”) it’s a terrific example of a marketer stepping into a conversation the consumer’s already having.

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Like Clutter? You’ll Love Heathrow

If your travels take you through London’s Heathrow Airport, prepare for an onslaught of sales messages, each one competing for ever-smaller slivers of your attention. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, they’re opening a fifth terminal with “more advertising than almost any airport in the world.

The numbers are astounding, especially as they compare with current major US airports:

From giant billboards overlooking security lines to television screens in the underground train station, the ads have been positioned in ways BAA hopes will make them impossible to avoid. There are 333 billboards or posters and 206 flat-screen TV sets, which can change ads to target specific flights. By contrast, Los Angeles International has 34 advertising TV sets in the entire airport and New York’s John F. Kennedy International has 40, according to JCDecaux, a Paris-based specialist in outdoor advertising that was hired to design and sell the new Heathrow ad space to marketers…

Typical Terminal Five visitors will see between 50 and 120 ads, depending on whether they arrive at the airport by car or train and whether they fly domestic or international flights, says Julie France, U.K. managing director of unit J.C. Decaux Airport. That’s at least one ad every two minutes and 55 seconds, based on the two hours and 26 minutes an average traveler spends at Heathrow.

One ad every two minutes and 55 seconds. Our brains aren’t getting any bigger, are they? How are consumers supposed to process all of it? If this idea makes it to our shores, how are advertisers supposed to break through?

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The Power of Free Samples

If you’re wondering how effective free samples are in influencing consumer behavior, a new study by the Oregon Department of Human Services provides a powerful answer. According to an article on Salem-News.com,

Public health researchers analyzed survey responses from 2,684 new mothers. Almost 67 percent said they were breastfeeding at the time they left the hospital and were still given a free discharge pack containing infant formula. Further exploration of the data showed the women who received the free formula breastfed for a shorter time period than women who went home without a formula gift pack.

There is some debate as to whether this is good or bad from a public health standpoint (and one might spend some time considering the morality of the practice), but it’s certainly an indication that free samples have a strong effect on subsequent buying behavior. It’s hard to imagine a more personal decision than whether to breastfeed a baby, but the evidence indicates that sampling influences that decision more than a little.

 

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Turning a Negative into a Selling Point

In the past couple of days, I’ve encountered two pharmaceutical companies who are dealing with the same issue — the taste of medicine — in two different ways.

 Nicorette is running radio commercials announcing “a revolution in quitting smoking… a stop-smoking gum that actually tastes good!” Apparently a common objection of Nicorette users up until now was that they hated the taste; Cinnamon Surge is a new product designed to get past that hurdle.

A day after hearing the Nicorette ad, I walked by a drug store display for Buckley’s Cough Mixture, featuring the tag line “It tastes awful. And It Works.” In contrast to Nicorette, Buckley’s has taken the bad taste and made it the centerpiece of their campaign for their “disgustingly effective products.” Their Myspace page (yes, cough syrup has a Myspace page, and I don’t) features the winners of the Buckley’s Bad Taste Face contest, along with a TV ad in which a blindfolded consumer is unable to tell the difference between Buckley’s and trash bag leakage.

In a previous post, I quoted from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, in which Robert Cialdini discusses the ways people make decisions with incomplete information:

To deal with it, we need shortcuts. We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy or capacity for it. Instead, we must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another these trigger features is present…

The example Cialdini cited involved tourists shopping for jewelry — a price rise actually increased demand, because the shoppers figured that a higher price denoted higher quality. Buckley’s is tapping into a similar psychological shortcut that cough syrup buyers might use: bad taste = effective medicine.

Nicorette is trying to change its prospects’ minds about their product. Buckley’s, by contrast, has accepted the consumer’s mindset and used it to the company’s benefit.

One problem, two opposite approaches. I like Buckley’s chances.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

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