Doing Advertising the Right Way - Part 2

Recap: Some of the time-proven lessons of advertising legend, Rosser Reeves, on whom Jon Hamm's character in Mad Men is based in part.

Lesson 2: The ideal life expectancy of a good campaign is forever
Here's an experiment that Reeves' firm conducted for a major brand 50 years ago.  The finding may surprise you - it certainly surprised me.  But it's just as applicable today to a marketing campaign as it was then.
Objective: Determine how long someone remembers an ad campaign (keeps it in their head).
The experiment: the penetration (unaided recall) for a major brand's campaign was 50% - which meant that 50% of the U.S. population sample knew it, and 50% didn't.  Six months later, with the same campaign - and same $ spend - still running, the same group of people interviewed a half year earlier were asked the same unaided recall questions.
The astonishing finding: half of the people who first recalled the campaign had forgotten it - no great surprise.  But half of the original group who could did not recognize the campaign now knew it!  The penetration remained the same after 6 months - it stood at the same 50% of the U.S. population.  Reeves' company found that this repeatedly held true for other campaigns conducted by similar companies.
But Reeves observed something else, too.  Most companies and their executives change campaigns after a year even if the penetration is high.  In other words, if penetration shoots up but sales do not, most executives do not have the patience to stay the course.
These learnings led to three principles which, by all accounts, hold true today.

1. When building or maintaining penetration, changing a story (the campaign theme) has the same effect as turning off the ad spending.  
2. If you run only brilliant campaigns, but change them often, a competitor who sticks to a good campaign will often pass you.
3. Unless the product becomes uncompetitive, a great campaign will not wear itself out.

Lesson 3: The average buyer will only remember one strong claim or concept.
Today we call it information overload.  But buyers have been suffering from it for decades.  In their landmark 1981 book, Positioning: the battle for your mind, Jack Trout and Al Ries coined the term tryanny of choice - the overwhelming number of products and attempts to promote them faced by the average buyer.  Marketers must not only compete with direct competitors in the product arena, but for mindshare as well.  Print, radio, TV, web, social media.  People can and will remember only so much.
From further experiments in penetration Reeves made two interesting and related discoveries:

1. As your penetration goes up, your competitors' penetration will go down, i.e. there is a finite amount that the average buyer will remember about all competitors in a product category.  I.E. if you increase your penetration from 25% to 50%, the aggregate penetration for all your competitors will, when tested, decrease from 75% to 50%
2. But, what happens in one product category does not affect the buyer's recall in other product categories.

The implications are twofold:

1. Great campaigns fuse all of the product components into one memorable message.
2. Increasing your own penetration also decreases the penetration of your competitors.

Lesson 4: Ultimate Selling Propositions are the levers that pull demand
In the 1950's Reeves developed what we know today as the value proposition.  His firm's experience showed that flash and dash (Reeves called this "show-window" advertising) could sell advertising contracts to clients, but sustainable value propositions were what moved the needle on generating demand and, ultimately, sales.  His firm backed this up (bear in mind they were a leader in their day) with a mound of evidence.

Reeves defined USPs precisely, as having three ingredients:

1. A customer proposition that confers a specific benefit to the buyer.
2. The proposition must be unique, i.e. competitors cannot or do not offer or mention it.
3. It must be compelling enough to pull customers, i.e. materially drive up penetration.

His firm's well-executed research showed that claims of usage (#1 seller) and preference (cosmetics used by the stars) were significantly more effective when the campaign revealed why.  This is what USPs are about.

Reeves observed that finding truly compelling and unique differentiators as the basis for USPs was difficult.  Over time, competitors catch up.  Just like they are doing with the iPhone and the iPad.  The data showed that there are three strategies that can be pursued to get ahead of the competition:

1. Find a relevant and compelling USP
2. Improve the product
3. If the product cannot be improved, preempt the competition with an attribute that is unique to the product (or firm) and deemed compelling by the competition

The third strategy is especially intriguing - a topic for an entire blog in its own right.