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Are you an Addict to the Cocaine of Advertising?
Ask your doctor how to feel good, and he’ll look you squarely in the eye and say, ‘’Eat right and exercise.’’ Yet for every dollar spent in the fitness centers, Americans spend nineteen dollars on cocaine.
The reason? Two seconds after you snort cocaine you feel like Superman. Two weeks of diet and exercise just makes you hungry and sore.
The desire for instant gratification is harmless enough if the only thing it leads you to do is pay higher prices at a convenience store. But heaven help if you demand instant gratification from your advertising! The business person looking for a financial quick fix will soon discover the cocaine of advertising, a four-letter magic chant:
SALE! SALE! SALE! SALE!
Good advertising is painful at first because you don’t see immediate results. The impatient business owner will usually snort a little ad cocaine and then get defensive about it: ‘’How can this be bad for me? I’ve never done better.
But just as the junkie never stops to consider how the drug is destroying his physical health, the business owner never stops to consider how ‘’Sale! Sale! Sale! Sale!’’ undermines his business health!
The first dose of cocaine makes him feel great. So does the next one, and the next, and the next - though it takes larger and larger doses to get the same effect. Therefore, it’s almost impossible to convince the addict he has a problem, even though he started with only ‘’Twenty Percent Off’’ and has now progressed to ‘’Half Price’’.
Successful companies don’t spend their ad dollars training their customers to wait for a sale. Do you?
KEEP YOUR FOOT ON THE GAS!
From: The Secret to Increasing Sales and Driving Higher Profits During a Slow Economy Bill Tood (www.BTodd.com)
This is by far the easiest principle of success to implement for any business. When the economy gets lousy, the vast majority of your competitors probably instinctively hit their sales and marketing brakes. Immediately any and all dollars associated with promoting their businesses are perceived as expenses and not investments. The result is that your competition drastically reduces expenditures for sales, direct mailing, advertising, trade shows, promotions, and so on.....
McGraw Hill has studied each of the recessions and economic slowdowns for the last five decades. The researchers’ findings clearly prove that those companies that continued to be aggressive in sales and marketing during these economic downturns experienced revenue growth of 275%....In contrast those businesses that cut back on sales, marketing and advertising enjoyed only a 19% increase in revenue during the same period.
Guess where the market moved to - the companies who continued to advertise.
A good analogy:
Your business is like your motor vehicle.
Advertising is like the fuel for the motor vehicle.
Don’t cut back on the very thing that keeps you moving
Roy Williams
Roy Williams is Entrepreneur.com’s “Advertising” columnist and the founder and president of international ad agency Wizard of Ads.
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