The art and science of effective marketing has been developed since the early days of bartering and commerce, but modern-day marketing as we know it only emerged in the 1900s when many industry giants came to prominence.
Since then, the landscape of brand-customer communication has changed immeasurably, but the fundamentals of marketing have remained relatively unchanged. The medium might have evolved in the age of social media, but the underlying message and strategies have stayed the same.
Here are 5 old school marketing fundamentals that have stood the test of time, and are still as relevant today as they were when they were first spoken.
- “The more story-appeal there is in the picture or in the photograph, the more people would look at your ad” – David Ogilvy
This quote speaks to advertisers who want to capture more of their audience’s attention with their advertising. It relates directly to one of the most effective forms of marketing – story-telling. When we tell a story about our products and services we are able to appeal to the child-like sense of wonder that exists within all of us. It’s all about taking our audience on a journey.One of the best ways to story-tell in your marketing is to illustrate someone in your target audience’s shoes going from their problem (or pain-point) to discovering your product (a solution) and then investing in it to successfully solve their problem. The more detail you add to the story, the better. The more you are able to creatively emphasise just how uncomfortable the character’s pain point is and how it is affecting their lives, the more your target audience will be able to empathically relate.
Likewise, when it comes a time in the story to introduce your solution (which took the character to a much better Point B) – it is important to emphasise how the character feels, now that their problem has been solved.
- “The goal is understanding. To persuade someone, to motivate someone, to sell someone, you really need to understand that person.” – Dan Kennedy
This is a quote by Dan Kennedy, a direct-response marketer who built a cult following for his marketing expertise during the 90s which his best selling book – The Ultimate Sales Letter.In this quote Dan illustrates the first-and-foremost goal of marketing, which is essential before pen even goes to paper (or hand goes to keyboard), understanding the customer.
Without a complete understanding of where a customer currently is, it becomes much more difficult for you to convince them that your product will bridge the gap and take them to where they want to be. After all, if we don’t understand our customer’s needs, then how can we be sure that what we are presenting to them is indeed a true solution?
Understanding however is just one half of the equation, that understanding then has to be demonstrated and communicated back to the customer in our marketing. Only then can the customer have complete confidence in what we’re offering. “Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. They care nothing about your interests or profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising” – Claude C. Hopkins
Claude wrote this quote in his book, Scientific Advertising, which was published all the way back in 1923. What we can extrapolate from this quote is that our own perception of our marketing really does not matter in the grand scheme of things. We can look at the ad creatives and copy we produce and think to ourselves ‘that looks great!’ or ‘that’s really quite clever’, but at the end of the day, a good ad is an ad that brings value to the target market, not us. Only when an ad makes a positive impact on the customer can a result potentially be created that aligns itself with a goal we’ve set as marketers. Getting caught up in our own personal opinions about our marketing is only useful in the rare circumstance where we ourselves are the target market, and even then we’re subject to bias.“The greatest mistake marketers make is trying to create demand.” – Eugene Schwartz
This quote is from Eugene Schwartz’s ‘Breakthrough Advertising’, a marketing manual tailored towards copywriters in particular. In this quote, Eugene challenges the idea that a marketer’s job is to create demand for a product.
As marketers, when we first read this sentence, we might be stopped in our tracks. If it is not the job of the marketer to create demand for a product or service, then whose job is it?
What Eugene is getting at, however, is that the marketer’s job is to channel demand, not create it.
Just as we can’t create energy, we can only transfer it, we can’t create demand, we can only channel it.
Eugene goes on to explain in his book that demand exists everywhere around us, and that as marketers we need to dig deeper to understand a customer’s greatest desires, before channelling the demand to get those desires met, towards our product.
A nice example of this would be the marketing of a simple product that many of us have – a phone case.
Not a lot of people genuinely desire a phone case, for what it is (a piece of sometimes bulky plastic molded to our phone).
However, we do have a desire not to waste our hard-earned money unnecessarily, or if we dig even deeper, we have a desire to avoid pain and annoyance in our lives. So when we imagine an annoying future scenario where we drop our phone and have to get it fixed or replaced, we’re going to have our desire to avoid pain channelled into an action of us purchasing the phone case. It is the marketer’s job to effectively create that visualisation (or bridge) in our minds, which is why many ‘tough phone case’ ads feature someone smashing their phone and looking distraught. Once that bridge is created, the desire can be channelled across to us.
“Customers are not on-off switches, but volume dials” – Don Peppers & Martha Rogers
This quote comes from Don Peppers & Martha Rogers’ book ‘The One to One Future’.
Written back in 1993, the book was certainly ahead of its time in predicting what customers would come to expect from the companies that advertised to them.
The quote itself likens a customer to a dial rather than a switch. Many business owners believe that they simply need to flick an ‘internal switch’ in the mind of a prospect in order to convince them to buy. However, this could not be farther from the truth. While there are of course prospects who will become customers at the drop of a hat, this usually comes from impulse buying, and it is not a predictable way to forecast future sales performance.
In the vast majority of cases, prospects need to be warmed up over time, until they finally reach the bottom of the funnel where they will be inclined to take action. We need to warm people up to our products and services at a pace that works for them as an individual as if we were adjusting a dial. Observing prospect behaviour, and understanding the typical progression of a prospect in our niche is key to this, essentially, we need to make sure we’re listening before we start talking.
Keeping this quote handy is a great reminder that as marketers we should always be looking to take a prospect on a journey through the sales funnel, instead of wasting time and advertising budget communicating to them with a call to action when they are not yet going to be receptive to it.
