Don’t let your advertising be the reason people don’t call you

Advertising, when done correctly, should not only make you remember a name brand and its meaning, but should make you want to actually purchase that product/brand.

Recently, I’ve caught myself saying “What a stupid commercial” way too often. For example:

An Audi commercial where Santa Claus departs his Santa throne to run after a car carrier that’s carrying a bunch of Audi cars. Not only is Santa running after the cars, but so are a hundred other people. This is sooooo silly. When have you ever seen hundreds of people running after a car carrier full of Audis? Or for that matter, any other cars? Never! And when have you seen Santa Claus leaving his post to chase something material? Never! It’s just dumb, and while I do remember the sponsor of the ad, all I remember is that Audi spends money on stupid ads. That ad wouldn’t make me buy one of those cars.

Or the Geico commercials where a bunch of people are waiting in a line to get into a movie, and the Geico gecko has stopped and is not moving forward in the line because he’s too busy talking. So the entire line is stopped. Please, no one wanted to push him up in line? That’s just too silly. Sure, it makes me remember Geico but would I call Geico because of that commercial? NO! I would not. I would purposely call someone else first.

Or what about the Activia commercials? They all suggest you need to purchase Activia as an Ex-Lax replacement. Come on, shouldn’t you be buying yogurt because it’s healthy and you like the taste? I wouldn’t buy it on purpose because I’d be too worried it might, uh, loosen me up! Sure, I remember the name of the yogurt, but I wouldn’t ever buy it. Dumb ad.

So what’s my point?

When we prepare marketing to make ourselves stand out and be memorable, people won’t use us if they remember who we are and remember what we do but don’t like our message. So when developing those marketing plans, we have to make sure we keep in mind the message we’re trying to send, and build our plan around our message. The last thing we should want is for some blogger somewhere to be writing about how they’d never call us because our ads are dumb. We want them to remember us and what we do, and to like our story enough to call us.

Now I’m off to watch more commercials.