Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

David Ogilvy said 40 years ago “the con­sumer is not a moron, she’s your wife.” It seems not every­one lis­tened because the indus­try con­tin­ues to insult her.

Ogilvy’s quip may be one of the most quoted phrases in mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing but mar­keters often don’t think it applies to them. Some­how it’s their cus­tomers that are of below aver­age intelligence.

In my 15-year career, often work­ing as a hired gun, I can say I’ve heard “you don’t under­stand, our cus­tomers just aren’t that smart” from clients in just about every pos­si­ble cat­e­gory (lux­ury brands excluded).

How­ever, I’ve never heard after an ad ran from a client or con­sumer that it was too com­pli­cated, too sophis­ti­cated, or too clever.

I believe this think­ing stems from two causes:

A) A lack of respect and under­stand­ing of your audience.

B) Expect­ing your audi­ence to under­stand your mar­ket­ing strat­egy and not your emo­tional benefit.

I’m not going to address A because if you don’t respect your cus­tomers you’re beyond hope. Sorry.

But I believe B is actu­ally more com­mon and wor­thy of discussion.

For the record this kind of think­ing isn’t just related to clients. It also come from inside agen­cies, out­side con­sul­tants, or just about any­where peo­ple sit around think­ing about prod­uct ben­e­fits too much.

As a copy­writer, my job is to trans­late the client’s core ben­e­fit into a com­pelling mes­sage for their cus­tomer. And com­pelling rarely means dumbed down.

What it does mean is find­ing the core emo­tional ben­e­fit wrapped in all the ana­lyz­ing that’s hap­pened before a project hits my desk. There are often great nuggets of infor­ma­tion in all the buzz­words and matri­ces. But reach­ing the con­sumer is rarely done using them.

The deep think­ing in these plan­ning and strat­egy doc­u­ments is tough to explain even to copy­writ­ers at times – so, of course, they’d be tough to explain to a con­sumer that doesn’t read them on a daily basis. That’s why great copy and art direc­tion reaches an audi­ence on a base emo­tional level.

Now, if you were expect­ing a con­sumer to fol­low the logic train devel­oped in your Pow­er­Point doc­u­ment,  you would need to “dumb it down.” But if you can trust your con­sumer to appre­ci­ate your brand on a gut level, you won’t ever feel the need to call your cus­tomers stu­pid or want to idiot proof your mes­sag­ing again.

Each com­po­nent of your brand story doesn’t need to be explained to a cus­tomer in every piece of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, nor does each ben­e­fit need to be spelled out. Just the ones that res­onate emo­tion­ally. And emo­tional argu­ments are much sim­pler and eas­ier to com­mu­ni­cate than ratio­nal ones. Here’s an exam­ple of what I’m talk­ing about:

Log­i­cally explain­ing prod­uct ben­e­fits straight out of a brand strat­egy. Our high-quality ser­vice, new fleet of air­craft, and on-time on time record makes  fly­ing with our air­line bet­ter than trav­el­ing with our competition.

The sim­pler exam­ple of re-framing the argu­ment emo­tion­ally. We take the frus­tra­tion out air travel.

Now it would be tough for your cus­tomer to fol­low the logic estab­lished in top exam­ple in each piece of com­mu­ni­ca­tion or maybe even any — espe­cially in a truly cre­ative exe­cu­tion. Yet, many mar­ket­ing exec­u­tives believe that the cus­tomers need to under­stand things the same way they do and blunt their adver­tis­ing to make it happen.

Good adver­tis­ing usu­ally requires sim­pli­fy­ing your promise and using emo­tional trig­gers. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you saw a Nike spot where the ben­e­fit of the cush­ion­ing of the rub­ber was explained? Or when was the last time you saw an Apple ad that talked about how the sil­i­con chips and soft­ware was engineered.

No, they stick with an emo­tional con­nec­tion to sports and sim­pli­fy­ing ones life. These are things that we, as human beings, res­onate with on a deeper level and don’t need to have argued to us. We just get them. And so will your customers.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

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This entry was posted Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 4:26 pm and is filed under advertising, creative, marketing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.