“How do we modernize our marketing?” [AMA]
There’s a real danger in the word “modernizing” your marketing because we tend to immediately leap towards thoughts like, “Well, I need to be on Snapchat.”
Naming the Disease
Nobody knew bad breath was a destructive social ill until Gerard Lambert pointed the blinding spotlight of his ads at the dangers of halitosis as a means of selling Listerine.
7 Elements of Successfully Selling Services Online
Products have product pages, but what do services have? Leaving these elements out of your copy is a fatal mistake.
90% of Local Advertising Summed Up In 2 Slogans
Optimizing a purchase demands more time, energy, and attention than anyone can spare for 99% of purchases. Instead, people simply want their needs filled and hoped-for benefits granted at a reasonably fair price. “Satisficing.”
What Advertising Can’t Do
Creativity worshippers tend to feel that while nothing works for sure, anything might work, so long as it’s rilly, rilly creative and the lightning strikes in their favor.
Sowing Rhetoric, HARVesting Attention
In another post, I lauded Paul Harvey’s “So God made a farmer” speech for its message. Mining it for rhetorical ore in this post feels a little sacrilegious…almost like making an ad out of it. Wait. I didn’t mean that.
Show Me the Future
You’ve seen this commercial before. A hand reaches for a Corona from behind an umbrella, a logo appears, and it all fades to black. If you can show me a version of me in the future, you’ve tapped into something powerful.
How to Get (and keep) Attention | Wizard’s Roundtable
I’m joined by Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer at System 1 Group in London. His book Lemon and subsequent short film Achtung! outline how we’ve lost customer’s attention over the years, and how to get it back.
Transactional vs. Relational Customers: Are You Attracting the Wrong People?
Given the disproportionate amounts of revenue and profit generated by Relational buyers, you might even expect an over-abundance of messaging aimed at Relationals. But that’s not what you find.
It’s Mostly Invisible
Customers need to like you before they need you. And “like” is mostly invisible. The reasons we do the things we do sit deep in the limbic part of our brains. It’s waaayyy down there. One of the first parts of the brain to form.
Advanced Branding for Ugly Duckling Businesses: Self-Disclosure & Human Connection
Think about the amount of times you chose a service provider — insurance salesman, realtor, lawyer, massage therapist, auto mechanic, plumber — based on the merest puff of a connection.
Magical Ad Writing for Everything From Piccolos to Recruitment
You have to: 1: Not sound like everybody else 2: Get into somebody’s imagination and mess around.
Are You Paying The Tax Of The Unremarkable?
These taxes include, but are not limited to: A higher cost per lead. A disloyal and price-sensitive customer. Inconsistent lead flow. Limited and unstable growth.
ESOV & FFA: Two Reasons 2021’s The Year You’ll Build Your Empire
Yes. 2021 will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to blow the doors off with rapid growth. Here’s why.
Learning From Legends — When The Obstacle IS The Way
There’s a reason Advertising Age named “A Diamond Is Forever” the best advertising campaign of the 20th century!