Does your marketing sell?: the secret of effective marketing communications

287 Pages·2005·4.063 MB·English

by  Ian Moore

Does Your
Marketing
Sell?

Does Your
Marketing
Sell?
The secret of
effective
marketing communications
Ian Moore
NI C H O L A S BR E A L E Y
PU B L I S H I N G
L O N D O N B O S T O N
I fy rhieni
First published by
Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2005
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Clerkenwell, London Boston
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Tel: [phone] Tel: (888) BREALEY
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© IanMoore 2005
The right of Ian Moore to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
ISBN 1-85788-350-0
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise
without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may
not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in
any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published,
without the prior consent of the publishers.
Printed inFinland by WSBookwell.
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Step 1 NAVIGATION – understanding 9
Step 2 EASE – convenience 36
Step 3 WORDING – conversation 73
Step 4 ATTENTION – serendipity 113
Step 5 INTEREST – persuadability 157
Step 6 DESIRE – knowledge 189
Step 7 ACTION – permission 225
Summary 252
Appendix 253
Notes 261
Index 271
Acknowledgments 279

INTRODUCTION
Putting the salesmanship back into marketing
Whether you run a small business or a big corporation (or work
somewhere in between), you probably get involved with mar-
keting communications. This could mean ads, brochures, dis-
play cards, leaflets, mailings, on-pack offers, posters, sales presenters,
websites... or simply “marketing” for short.
And like most people, you probably wonder if your marketing sells. I
expect you’re not 100 percent sure, even if you employ a specialist adver-
tising, design, or promotional agency to help you. In fact, I bet you’re not
even 50 percent sure.
Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Lord Leverhulme, founder of
Lever Bros, famously said:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is
I don’t know which half.”1
In fact it can be more serious than that. John Caples, one of the pioneers
of “scientific advertising” in the US, cited a campaign in which one head-
2
line created 19 times more response than an otherwise identical ad.2
The missing ingredient
So why does one piece of marketing succeed where another fails? What is
it that causes almost 20 times as many people to respond to one message
than to another? Just how do you make your marketing sell?
In my experience, there’s a paradox. What well-intentioned marketers
thinkthey should do to make their marketing sell often doesn’t work. And
that’s because they get salesmanship confused with showmanship.
Salesmanship is the missing ingredient in making your marketing sell.
DOES YOUR MARKETING SELL?
What I mean by salesmanship — and you may be relieved to hear this —
are the quiet skills of empathy and perception. These are skills that are so
often abandoned in modern marketing communications. This book is all
about how to put them back.
But what do I know?
I was immediately struck by the lack of salesmanship in marketing com-
munications when I started my first classical marketing job. (I became a
product manager launching a new brand of bathroom tissue.) Having
spent the previous six years working in sales and sales training, I suppose
I was well placed to note the contrast. I’ve since been reassured to discover
that many of history’s most feted and successful advertising copywriters,
including greats such as Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy, started out life
treading the streets as lowly salesmen. Perhaps this is no coincidence?
For my own rather more modest part, I was astonished by the general
lack of urgency, or even interest, shown by the professional marketing
community toward selling. By this I mean that nobody seemed able to tell
me, then a relative novice in the art of ad making, how the ads actually
worked. Even people in my advertising agency — one of the grandest in
London at the time — were puzzled that I should pose the question.
I was determined not to accept this state of affairs. But despite working
for some of the world’s biggest companies and best-known brands, and
studying in my spare time for an MBA specializing in marketing communi-
cations, I never found an easy helping hand. At work there was lots of “what
we did” (but not “why we did it”) and at college there was lots of theory (but
not how to apply it). It seemed that practitioners were too busy and aca-
demics too detached. The result: Marketing does not sell like it could.
So my quest has been for a simple understanding. For 25 years now I’ve
collected marketing tips, scoured textbooks, attended courses and semi-
nars, and picked the brains of anyone who appeared to understand what
makes for good communication. I gained invaluable practical experience
working in marketing for firms such as Kimberly-Clark and Cadbury
Schweppes, where I did my share of television advertising, and for Lloyds
bank (now Lloyds TSB), where I ran a direct marketing operation. I also
spent a couple of years as a director of the sales promotion agency Clarke-
2
INTRODUCTION
Hooper, working on a wide range of clients’ businesses, ranging from Bell’s
whisky to Pyrex dishes. (I’ve now worked on over 100 major brands.3)
By 1990 I felt ready to take the plunge and formed my own marketing
agency.4My learning curve steepened dramatically. But right from the start
I was able to put into practice a mixture of knowledge and intuition, and
we began to achieve exceptional results for our clients. We regularly dou-
bled and trebled the accepted “industry norm” response rates — often it
was 10 or more times.5And it didn’t seem to matter whether it was an ad,
a mailing, or a promotional offer. For instance:
✰
An ad for Royal & SunAlliance6 achieved a response of 27.9
percent.
✰
An on-pack offer for Newcastle Brown Ale7 achieved a response of
43.2 percent.
✰
And a direct marketing program for Reebok8achieved a response of
91 percent.
Campaign after campaign, results exceeded expectations. Our case studies
began to be featured in respected marketing textbooks and journals.9And
we won over 50 effectiveness-based awards for our work.10
In our first year I came up with the idea of a Hay Fever Survival Kit for
Kleenex tissues.11 This won the Institute of Sales Promotion Grand Prix12
for the best campaign of 1991, beating British Airways into second place
(there were over 800 other entries), and was also voted the best European
consumer activity.13 It has been credited with a major contribution to the
growth of the brand14and it is still alive and kicking — possibly the longest-
running and most effective campaign of its kind.15
Evidently we were doing something right. And perhaps something dif-
ferent. I was flattered by the attention we received, but as far as I was con-
cerned, there was no secret.
Sure, we had some good creative ideas, but neither we nor our clients
had a monopoly in that department. If we excelled anywhere, it was in our
obsession with selling. By this I mean not selling toour clients, but forour
clients.
3