E-mail comments from Doug Hoffman of San Luis Paper Co.
Subject: Our Take on Advertising, “You’re Boring. Someone Had to Say It,” BCAFYI 6/18/09.
Yes! Today, people are mostly desensitized to the vast majority of ads in all media. “Big Sale” and ”Lowest Prices” are useless for two reasons. As you state, gross over-exposure and too many broken promises! Today’s average consumer is a lot more savvy than in the past. The Internet lets them really check prices on commodity items. The boasts and brags still dominating ads and repeated over and over by “pitch men” are easily shown to be clearly false. Shout untruths into their ears often enough and the consumer turns the ads off. How do you attack this “desensitization by repetition?”
A. Word of mouth and referrals by credible sources still are powerful tools. They work!
B. Replace trying to sell the obvious with stating the value: What will this product do to improve your situation and then prove it! The gross investment in simply delivering recognizable value one time still generates so much repeat and referral business that the initial cost is recovered many times over.
Want to look over the edge? Get off the TV screen, back out of the radio and try to meet people where they live and work with identifiable and measurable value. Face-to-face, classically attractive printed materials and posters that are eye-catching as works of art in their own right, these are what I see getting people’s attention and being recalled and commented on long after the exposure.
