http://www.stepchangemarketing.com/ In this Slideshare presentation: 1-5 The law of selling

1. The Law of Selling
By David Trott
Can anyone remember the purpose of Of course we didn’t design to do anything so
advertising: why we get paid to do what we do? crude as telling consumers what the product
was, or why they should buy it. So guess what,
Are we TV sitcom writers: is it to make people they didn‘t.
laugh? Are we gag writers for observational
comedians: putting our finger on telling truths? The dotcom boom was the time people started
to believe you just had to ‘build brand’, not sell
Are we prose stylists, delivering beautifully written product. When the dotcoms disappeared, the
passages of literature? non-advertising industry built up on their backs
stayed around. Teaching a new generation of
I’d like to suggest a terribly old—fashioned view marketing trainees that the ‘S’ word is dinosaur
of the fundamental, purpose of what we do, that thinking.
I know will get me laughed out of every trendy
media bar and restaurant in Soho. What really clever people do is ‘brand building’.
Brand diamonds, brand keys, brand doughnuts,
lt’s the ‘S’ word (gasp). (“What ? You mean brand personality, brand profile, brand signature,
talking people into buying things, like a shop brand architecture, brand onion, brand halo. Say
assistant? Man, where did you goto university?”) the word ‘brand’ often enough and everything will
Yes, I know we don’t do anything as crass as that be okay.
anymore.
Now, I’m not saying that ‘building the brand’
Nowadays we‘re much more sophisticated: we isn’t ever the answer. What I am saying is, it isn’t
‘Build Brands’.We don’t look at the sales figures, always the answer. But it’s become a simple
we look at the tracking scores. knee-jerk solution to avoid the discomfort of
thinking about the ‘S’ word. lt has become a
Never mind if anyone’s buying it, have we won an religion. And the purpose of all religions is to
IPA Effectiveness Award, or a D&AD pencil? We avoid thinking. To keep you in a state of belief
don’t sell products to consumers anymore.Now and superstition. Which is what ‘brand’ has
we sell OUR product: advertising. become, the advertising superstition. Like
touching wood.
And we sell it to our clients and peers: in Soho,
Cannes, or Lurzer’s Archive. Of course there are great brands which can
charge a premium for any product with their
Not only hasn’t the Emperor got any clothes, name attached. But (and, like anything that
none of the rest of us have either. I thought we’d questions religion, this is going to sound like
reached the zenith (your zenith is my nadir) of this heresy) before they were great brands they were
type of non-advertising during the dotcom boom. great products.
When computer nerds with fistfuls of cash
wandered into agencies and said ‘Make How the brands got built, was the advertising
something we like, man.’....So we did. sold products in an appropriate way. (The ‘brand
building’ is the part that’s underlined.)
Great pieces of film that all the new media types
loved. They couldn’t sell the brand, because the brand
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2. Step Change Marketing
didn’t exist. All that existed was the product, and there?
the name. So they sold that in an appropriate I’d like to suggest thinking for ourselves as an
way. And a brand got built. Now, once a brand’s alternative to blind faith.
built, you can sell the brand because it exists. But
before the product builds the brand you can‘t sell The problem, as we’ve seen with ‘brand’, is that
the brand, because it doesn’t exist. we have a whole industry of people dedicated to
making what we do as complicated as possible.
And it’s silly to sell something that doesn’t exist, Dedicated to making it virtually impenetrable to
isn’t it? So why are so many of us still doing any outsiders.
something that’s silly?
We need to demystify the process. We need
Well, let’s lake a look at how religions work. The to give everyone access to it. So that the best
truly blessed are those who have faith, those who solution wins, not just the most complicated one.
believe without questioning. We need a device so simple anyone can use it.
That’s where what I call the Binary Brief comes in.
But what if you’re a little confused about what a
‘brand’ is, and how it works’? FIGURE 1
Well, like any religion, we have priests to guide
you in the mysterious ways of ‘brand’. Specialists
who write articles about what ‘brand’ is, how
‘brand’ works, ‘brand’ beliefs, even mistaken
‘brand’ beliefs.
We have seminars, conferences, and books
about the different manifestations of ‘brand’.
All agree on one thing, ‘brand’ is totally
It’s called ‘binary‘ because all you do is choose
mysterious to the mind of man, and ‘brand’ is all
between two alternatives, like the zeros and ones
powerful. The problem is, if you substitute belief
of binary code. Like the binary code, it’s fast, and
for thinking, you believe your answer is always
it’s unambiguous.
right in every situation, no matter what. And, of
course, it isn’t. Which is why we have so much
But the real value of the process is the rigid
expensive advertising failing all the time.
discipline that you need to apply to the result.
One problem with blindly following this route
You must only choose ONE of each pair of
is that, handled lazily, many brand values are
alternatives.
the same within a particular market. (How
many times have you seen the brand defined
The questions are ranked in three levels. 1)
as ‘modern, approachable, and honest’ on the
What? 2) Who? 3) How?
brief?)
That’s it.
So if all the brands in the market are selling
similar brand values, who wins?
What does the advertising need to achieve?
Should we grow the market, and (if we’re number
It’s a no-brainer because, unless you change the
one) take the major share of the increase?
dynamics of the market, the market leader must
win more from any market growth.
Or should we go up against whoever’s bigger
than us, and try to take share from them?
So, given that there‘s usually only one brand
leader in any market, pure brand advertising is
Who should we target? Can we get our current
going to be wrong more often than it’s right. But
users to buy more of our product, or buy it more
if ‘brand’ advertising isn’t infallible, what else is
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often? Or should we be looking to get people So the market grows, and number one takes the
who‘ve never tried it to switch to it? major share of that growth, thank you very much.
How do we do it? Do we have a genuine USP?
(A ‘perceived’ USP is fine, but the letter ‘S’ is FIGURE 3
really important. It‘s all very well being unique,
but does anyone want what we’re unique for?) Or
should we be selling the brand? If so, how? NOW
is when vast army of ‘brand-builder’ specialists
can get involved. Because now we know what
we’re doing, who we’re doing it to, and why.
This all makes sense, right? In fact it’s so simple
it’s hardly worth bothering with. So how come
it took the marketing brains at Pepsi Cola half a
century to get to this clarity of thinking?In fact,
just to illustrate how it works, let‘s hold the two
Cola giants against the Binary brief.
FIGURE 2
It took Pepsi many decades to wake up and
realise that as long as they were selling cola
values, they were just doing Coke’s advertising
for them. They had to start talking people out of
Coke and into Pepsi.
FIGURE 4
Coca Cola was obviously number one in the
Cola market. All they needed to do was sell Cola
values and they’d get the major share of any
growth in the market. Pepsi looks at Cola, sees
they got successful and thinks we’ll do the same
thing. You see it in every market.
Numbers two and three are so hypnotised by
number one that they let them make the rules So how to do that? Well obviously they had to
for that market, and are scared to deviate. Brand be talking to people about why they should try
advertising worked so well for number one, we’d Pepsi. They had to go for Triallists.
better do the same thing, but with our name
on the end. And, because you’re in the same
market, the brand values you are selling are
usually the same brand values that number one is
selling.
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FIGURE 6 FIGURE 8
So they kept selling Cola values. The problem
Fair enough, but what message was going to get was everyone, everywhere had already tried
Coke drinkers to change brands? Coke, so how do you increase sales? The answer
was get existing customers to use more.
Well, selling Pepsi according to cola values hadn’t
worked.They needed something differentiating. FIGURE 9
Why would anyone switch from Coke? They’d
need a reason.
‘Pepsi tastes better’ is a good place to start, if
you can back it up.
They had research that could. So they went for
USP: take the Pepsi challenge. The aggressive
nature of the advertising (selling the product in an
appropriate way) became the Pepsi brand. Now So the message became: don’t just have a Coke
they have better advertising than they’ve ever on your own, have one with a friend, it’s much
had, and none of it’s for Coke. So, according to nicer to share. I’d like to buy the world a Coke.
the Binary brief, Pepsi went for: Brand Share, Finally, Coke virtually built the cola market, so
Triallists, USP. it could just appropriate all the market values
to itself. They must do brand advertising. So,
They had to aggressively go for brand share. against the Binary brief, Coca Cola went for:
Market Growth, Current Consumers, Brand.
FIGURE 7 FIGURE 10
Meanwhile Coke was more interested in growing
the market. They figured they could get much
So that‘s how it works. You make three simple
more growth from increasing the overall size of
choices and you have one of eight possible
the market, than they could from worrying about
advertising strategies. All your advertising is
taking share from their smaller competitor.
briefed according to those choices.
All your advertising is judged against them.
You can make the decision making process as
complex and thorough as you want, you can take
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days arguing back and forth over each decision. I think we can stop being ashamed of what we
But at the end, you must have chosen only one do, and pretending we’re doing something else. I
of each of the alternatives. think the consumers have worked out what those
little films between the programmes are for.
That all sounds simple enough, right? Well it is
simple. But it’s not easy. It`s very tough to make I think they know they’re adverts. They just don’t
those choices. And that’s the whole point. Most know: who, what, or why.
marketing people, clients and agency, live in
denial. They want their advertising to include all
of those alternatives. They don’t want to leave
anything out.
They refuse to make those choices. So they get
made for them, by the consumer. Remember
the old analogy of throwing six tennis balls at the
consumer, and they won’t catch any?
Well that’s not quite true. Throw six tennis balls at
the consumer and they’ll probably catch one. But
there‘s a five to one chance it won’t be the one
you wanted them to catch.
So make the decision up front, don’t trust it
to luck. It you’re a creative, take a look at the
brief you’re working on, have they made those
choices?
If you’re a client, take a look at the advertising
you’re being shown, is it clear from the ads what
those choices are?
Because it it isn’t clear to you, what possible
chance has the consumer got of working it out?
That is, of course, assuming that we’re still doing
advertising for consumers. And not just as some
vague ‘extension of the PR component of the
brand building exercise’. Understand, there’s
nothing wrong with ‘brand building’. When it’s
appropriate.
My problem is that, because it’s kept so vague
and ephemeral, it’s used to cover up an awful lot
of lazy thinking.
That’s why I think we need to demystify the
whole process. We don’t want ordinary thinking
and clever words. We want clever thinking and
ordinary words.
That’s why it’s time to bring the ‘S’ word out of
the closet.
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