Health Club Advertising — Meant to Mislead?

Would you set up a system where you deliberately disappoint and anger the people who respond to your marketing? The fitness club industry appears to be doing just that.

On the Get Rich Slowly blog, J.D. Roth details his adventures as he attempts to figure out what it will cost to join a health club. The post is called “Ads I Hate: East Side Athletic Club”, and it begins with a sour experience he has when he responds to that club’s direct mail. He also has trouble getting a straight answer on prices at 24 Hour Fitness and Bally.

More than 75 comments follow the post, many detailing bait-and-switch tactics at fitness clubs all over the country.

Do all health clubs act this way? No — Roth praises Nelson’s Nautilus here in Portland, and the YMCA gets high marks in the comments section. Clearly, there are some good guys.  But it appears that few industries generate more distrust with their marketing than this one.

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2008 SalesGenie Ads — I Think They’ll Work

Time to follow up last year’s post on the SalesGenie Super Bowl ads.

To start with, a note so that you don’t think I’m a complete boob: I hated them. Poor animation. Ethnically insulting, bordering on racist. Not even remotely clever.

And yet…

I think they’ll work. And by “work”, I mean bring in enough business to the company that the seven-figure ad buy turns a profit for them.

The first-quarter ad actually told a story that could resonate with salespeople — a failing seller is threatened with loss of employment, signs up with SalesGenie, and wins Salesman of the Year honors. It answers a question that many sellers are asking — “How can I double my sales?”, cleverly typed by the seller into Google. The answer? SalesGenie.com.

It’s got a clear call to action, with a reward that will appeal to salespeople and managers — go to SalesGenie.com and get 100 free leads for every rep in your company.

The second ad — the one with the pandas — told a story that seemed less clear, but the call to action was there with the same reward.

Neither ad was an artistic success. But as the economy goes south, there is an increasing demand among salespeople for anything that might give them an edge. Even if the tone offends them (and I suspect there’s a segment that won’t be bothered at all), they are likely to hold their noses and give the company a shot. I’m thinking SalesGenie may win the only award that counts.

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Does “Long Tail Media” Pencil Out?

There’a a provocative post by Chris Anderson on the Long Tail Blog about public radio. Mr. Anderson is a fan of a number of public radio shows, but doesn’t much like his local station. And he hates Pledge Week. So…

I’m listening to more and more of my favorite NPR shows (This American Life, Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, Science Friday, etc) as podcasts, something that finally suits me thanks to having a phone that automatically loads the latest shows. I don’t have to avoid the NPR pledge drive anymore…

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don’t have to take the bad shows with the good. I’ve got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it.

Anderson believes that radio is going to get “microchunked” so that people can listen to just the shows they want without ever tuning into the station that originated it. He talks about avoiding Pledge Week — I suppose the equivalent is avoiding the ads on commercial radio. 

This is especially interesting to someone like me — my day job is selling advertising on a group of commercial stations. I’m somewhat skeptical (and yes, it’s in my self-interest if the old model holds together long enough for me to get to retirement age). But I wonder:

 Who’s going to pay for all this? Right now, someone can hire me to design a campaign that will deliver their sales message to hundreds of thousands of people. They pay significant dollars for the access to this large audience, which allows my company to pay for the equipment, announcers, engineers, license fees, traffic reporters, and other expenses involved in putting on a broadcast. And there’s enough money left over to compensate me for designing the campaign.

What happens in this magical future when media’s microchunked, and the campaign reaches a few hundred people instead of a few hundred thousand? Does everyone’s paycheck get microchunked, too? And if that happens, how many of these shows actually get produced?

 Just asking.

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A Cautionary Tale

Can advertising work too well?

Yesterday’s post got me thinking about an auto collision shop I worked with in the late 90’s. The amazing Todd Tolces created a very entertaining series of commercials in which humor was wrapped around a good sales message (I contributed by playing the commercials for the client and cashing the commission checks).

It took a couple of months, but the campaign began to bring in customers. And then more customers. After a while people were driving their dented cars long distances to have them fixed by this particular shop.

The business grew, and the owner desperately needed more technicians. But with unemployment at record lows, good technicians were impossible to find. So they he hired a couple who weren’t so good, and the quality of their work dropped off. Although we continued to run their commercials, I stopped referring people there after they botched the job on my boss’s car.

Word of mouth turned bad, and the shop lost several big fleet accounts. After a while there were layoffs, and they couldn’t afford to advertise anymore. The business very nearly closed down.

All because the advertising worked, and they weren’t ready.

Are you?

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Good Advertising Can Kill a Bad Business

I read that somewhere — unfortunately, not even Google can remind me where.

But it came to mind the other day when I met with the owner of a home improvement company. I’d put together a very powerful ad campaign for him, and we were scheduled to hit the airwaves in six days. But he wanted to postpone it.

My initial reaction was to try to talk him out of postponing. It’s been a rough few months in the industry, and I was convinced that the campaign would truly enter the conversation that homeowners were having as they thought about remodeling.

But he stopped me short with a surprising statement — in the past two weeks, his traffic had jumped considerably. Interest rates had dropped to the point where buyers were finally being lured back into the game. His salespeople were (finally!) so busy scheduling jobs that they couldn’t handle any new ones. He didn’t want the phone to ring until he had more people in place to take care of the new customers.

Although it took money out of my pocket, he was right to postpone. If the campaign had launched and gotten the job done (and trust me… it’s good), he risked disappointing and angering his new customers by putting them off or doing shoddy work. They would have ultimately taken their business elsewhere, and the word-of-mouth would have been disasterous.

Better to wait a few weeks and get it right.

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