Category: Portland marketing

Super Bowl Advertising — Another Chance For Experts to Miss the Point

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal article on first-time Super Bowl advertisers begins this way:

Super Bowl viewers will be on the lookout for rookie mistakes — and not just on the field.

Advertising at the big game is a gamble for newcomers not just because of the rising cost of buying the ads — advertisers are paying up to $2.7 million for a 30-second spot this year, up from $2.6 million in 2007 — but also the risk to their reputations if the commercials fall flat or offend.

When the game’s over, there will be articles and polls on which were the “best” and “worst” ads. Most will judge the commercials on artistic merit, missing what should be advertising’s ultimate goal — to sell something.

One advertiser from last year’s game who kept its eye on the prize was SalesGenie, whom I wrote about a few weeks after the game. Just about all the experts hated their commercial. SalesGenie cheerfully accepted the abuse, and kept bringing truckloads of money to the bank.

Here’s another, according to the Journal:

One of last year’s newcomers, Garmin Ltd., the maker of GPS devices, is coming back this year despite coming in low on some ad poll lists with an ad featuring a map that turned into a Godzilla-inspired monster. Reaction “was a mixed bag but it was still a success,” says Ted Gartner, media relations manager at Garmin. “As long as people are spelling our name right and still purchasing the Garmin units, it’s all good.”

 

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A Price Hike Can Increase Demand

Over at Landing the Deal, Dan Tudor uses the launch of the $2,500 Tata Nano automobile as a jumping-off point in the debate over whether the lowest price always wins. Below are a couple of cases where it doesn’t:

In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini writes of a jewelry store owner in Arizona who was stuck with some turquoise jewelry that wasn’t selling. She told one of her employees to cut the price, but the clerk misunderstood her and doubled the price instead.

A few days later, before they’d realized the mistake, the entire allotment of jewelry had sold out. The increased price had managed to make the jewelry more desirable to the customers who walked into the store. Cialdini explained the phenomenon this way:

You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex that has ever existed on this planet. 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 customers, mostly well-to-do vacationers with little knowledge of turquoise jewelry, were using a standard principle — a stereotype — to guide their buying: “expensive = good”.

The higher price told them that this was “good” jewelry, so they bought it. Cutting the price would have steered them in the opposite direction.

Another example of this phenomenon at work appears (thank you, Chris Speer of 1190 KEX Radio) in a recent Associated Press article on a wine tasting. A research crew at California Institute of Technology discovered that a higher price tag on the bottle made the wine inside tasted better.

The lesson here is that the supply-and-demand price equation from your college economics doesn’t always take consumer psychology into account. Sometimes a price hike will help your sales.

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Can You Solve All Your Problems With a 30-Second Spot?

The short answer is… um… no.

A longer and more interesting answer appears on a recent episode of the public radio show This American Life. The episode is called “Shouting Across the Divide” (it originally aired in 2006) and concerns “what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire.”

In a segment called “America, the Ad Campaign”, the US State Department hires an ad agency to “sell American values to the Muslim world.” It doesn’t work out so well. The show runs an hour, and the segment is about 15 minutes. You can listen to the episode, or download an mp3 for free here.

The episode delves into some fairly contentious areas of racial and cultural politics. I will carefully avoid them here, and offer two observations for those who, like me, write ad copy for a living:

1. If your business has big problems, advertising won’t fix them.

2. It’s tough to sell anything — a product, service, or idea — when you don’t like or understand the people you’re marketing to.

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Why Logic Doesn’t Always Work in Marketing

It’s a cliche in the sales and marketing world — people make buying decisions emotionally, not logically. Tracy Coenen of WalletPop offers evidence from the world of cosmetics. Citing a university study of 300 women in England, Coenen reports that women using a product that isn’t working are likely to keep using it — and women using a product that actually works are likely to stop.

The researchers believe that fear may be the motivating factor behind this behavior. When the products work, women have less anxiety about the problem, so they stop using the stuff. When they think the products aren’t working and they’re concerned about their appearance, they stick with the products out of fear.

The lesson to those who depend on repeat business is to think about not just the problem that you’re in business to solve, but the underlying emotions of the people experiencing the problem — and how they really react when it’s solved.

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How Language Affects Real Estate Prices

For those in any industry who agonize over their media choices and then have someone “just bang some copy out”, here’s more evidence that every word can be precious. 

Interesting article on msn.com about how the choice of words in a listing can increase — or lower — the perceived value of the house.  

“In real-estate listings, what’s the difference between describing your home as “beautiful” versus “move-in condition”? About $12,500 on a $250,000 home. Professor Paul Anglin, a real-estate economist in Guelph, Ontario, says that homes described as “beautiful” in real-estate listings sell for 5% more while “move-in condition” has no effect on sale price.”“

Word choices can also affect the time it takes to sell.

“Listings with the words “beautiful” or “gorgeous” sold 15% faster. “Landscaping” in a listing hastened a sale by 20%. Describing a property as in “move-in condition” quickened the sale by 12%. Calling a home a “handyman special” cut sale time by half (researchers excluded listings that used the term to describe a workshop or hobby area). “

The article’s especially valuable for the chart that matches individual words up with their effect on listing price, sale price, and speed of sale.

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