Tag: jewelry advertising

“We Had A Really Nice Ad”

I subscribe to Roy Williams‘ view that campaigns rarely fail because they use the wrong medium; they fail because they deliver the wrong message. But it’s an uphill battle — one of the most common objections an advertising salesperson hears is “We tried [name of medium here] and it didn’t work.”

The other day a jewelry store owner told me he wasn’t interested in meeting with me because “we tried radio once and it didn’t work. We had a really nice ad, and it didn’t bring us any business.”

If it didn’t bring you any business, I asked, what made it a really nice ad?

“Several people called us,” he replied, “and asked where they could buy the music.”

The most depressing part of the conversation is that he delivered the line completely without irony. Someone in my profession convinced him to spend good money on a campaign whose most memorable feature was the music.

Years later, this business owner still believes that this ineffective commercial is how a jewelry store radio ad is supposed to sound. And that — Tom Shane and Woody Justice notwithstanding — radio won’t work for his store.

If he’d been willing to meet with me, I might have showed him what a really, really nice ad sounded like. An ad that sells jewelry, not music.

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Steady Marketing Builds Trust

One of the most common — and frustrating — conversations that advertising/marketing professionals have with their clients is the one where the client just wants to advertise when they have a special event, or at “peak” times of the year.

  • The jeweler who only advertises at Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas
  • The car dealer who’s off the air for six months and then does a blitz for a weekend
  • The piano dealer who does a big newspaper campaign when they have a sale, and then goes quiet until the next one.

Those of us who’ve been at this for a while know the value of consistency — of getting into the customer’s head over time. The big sale campaign is so much more effective when the potential customers are already familiar with the merchant. And some businesses (The Shane Company is an example that comes to mind — love him or hate him, you know Tom Shane and why you should come to his store) are so successful at this that they never have to do a big sale.

Sometimes we win the argument, and sometimes we lose. Our most successful clients “get it”, stay in front of their customers, and reap the benefits. We do the best we can with the rest.

In an effort to win more of those arguments, I’m going to be borrowing the words of Seth Godin, who has a very powerful post on his blog this morning. The money quote, for me, is this:

The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.

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

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.