Now tell me this: how long do you plan to be in business? Are you going for the hundred-meter dash of would you like to be in the lead at the end of the marathon? Oh, really? Then why do you advertise as though this weekend were the last time your customers will ever have the opportunity to buy from you?

Short-term advertising – the sprint- is a race for fools. As a marketing strategy, it’s self-defeating to train your customers to sit on the sidelines waiting for your next “Moonlight Madness Sale.” You should be conditioning them to think of you automatically when they need what you’re selling.

Here are the runners:

“Branding” is the hot new buzzword favored by the smooth-talking ad people who always seem to speak as though it were something new and mysterious. I have yet to find even one of these empty suits who has the slightest idea of how branding is accomplished in the mind.

Branding is far from new. Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel prize for his research into branding in 1904. Remember the story? Day after day, research would ring a bell as he rubbed meat paste onto the tongue of a dog. The dog soon began to associate the taste of the meat with the sound of the bell until salivation became the dog’s conditioned response. In psychological terms, this is implanting an associative memory – in other words, “branding,” in its full glory.

There are three keys to implanting an associative memory into the mind of you customer. The first key is consistency. Pavlov never offered food without ringing the bell, and he never rang the bell without offering food. The second key is frequency, meaning that Pavlov did it day after day after day.

The third key, anchoring, is the tricky one. When associative memory is being implanted, the new and unknown element (the bell) has to be associated with a memory that’s already anchored in the mind (the taste of meat). Frequency and consistency create branding only when your message is tied to an established emotional anchor. Pavlov’s branding campaign was anchored to the dog’s love for the taste of meat. If the dog did not love meat, the frequent and consistent ringing of the bell would have produced no response other than to irritate the dog.

If I say, “It’s a Norman Rockwell kind of restaurant,” you immediately think of the place as being cozy, happy, warm, innocent, and kid-friendly, right? Your assumptions about the restaurant are anchored to your feelings about the art of Norman Rockwell. If I frequently and consistently cause you to associate the restaurant with Norman Rockwell, I am implanting an associative memory into your mind – branding.

The buying public is your dog. If you desire a specific response from it, you must tie your identity to an emotional anchor that’s already know to elicit the desired response. If you make such an association consistently and frequently, branding will occur. But don’t expect too much too soon. It takes a lot of repetition to train the dog to salivate at the sound of your name.

Do you have the patience, Pavlov?

Roy H. Williams is president of Roy H. Williams Marketing Inc.
He may be reached at 512-295-5700 or by e-mail at roy@WizardOfAds.com
www.wizardofads.com

Ask your physician how to feel good, and he’ll look you squarely in the eye and say, “Eat right and exercise.” Yet for every dollar spent in fitness centers, Americans spend nineteen dollars on cocaine. The reason? Two seconds after you snort cocaine you feel like Superman. Two weeks of diet and exercise just makes you hungry and sore.

The desire for instant gratification is harmless enough if the only thing it leads you to do is pay higher prices at a convenience store. But heaven help you if you demand instant gratification from your advertising! The business person looking for a financial quick fix will soon discover the cocaine of advertising, a four letter magic chant.

SALE! SALE! SALE!

Good advertising is painful at first because you don’t see immediate results. The impatient business owner will usually snort a little ad cocaine and then get defensive about it: “How can this be bad for me? I’ve never done better!” But just as the junkie never stops to consider how the drug us destroying this physical health, the business owner never stops to consider how “Sale! Sale! Sale!” undermines his business health. The first dose of cocaine makes him feel great. So does the next one, and the next, and the next – though it takes larger and larger doses to get the same effect. Therefore, it’s almost impossible to convince the addict he has a problem, even though he started with one “Twenty Percent Off’ and has now progressed to “Half Price.”

Successful companies don’t spend their ad dollars training their customers to wait for a sale. Do you?

Roy H. Williams is president of Roy H. Williams Marketing Inc.
He may be reached at 512-295-5700 or by e-mail at roy@WizardOfAds.com
www.wizardofads.com