What They Don't Teach You at UCT... - July 17th

We live in an over-communicated world. The average person will 'see' approximately 3000 adverts a day, and virtually not a single one will be remembered. Why is that?

I think it's because we're all focused on branding, instead of selling.

Every formal marketing course that I've come across teaches the same thing... 'brand equity this', 'brand awareness that'... preaching what works best for large corporations like Coca Cola and McDonalds. But what if you aren't a big fancy corporation and you don't plan on working inside of one?

In contrast, everything I've ever leaned from internet marketing gurus, like Jay Abraham, Eben Pagan, Jeff Johnson... is that small businesses need to focus on sales and cash-flow. Therefore they should focus on direct response marketing and forget about trying to emulate big corporations.

Some of these guru-dudes even go as far to say that branding is somewhat of a 'crutch'. They say that doing sales and actually asking someone to buy your product/service is an anxiety provoking activity where you have to face rejection. So what we do? We brand! And what happens if people don't buy? It's someone else's fault!... not us. We did good branding. No sales though...

Here's where I'm going with this:
The kind of advertising you decide to do will often communicate what is at the core of your marketing. So why does most advertising suck? Because at the core is branding. It's all, "you should buy this because we stand for family values" or something of the like.

Great advertising that actually stops you dead in your tracks is the kind that makes use of sales tactics, and understanding of the customer's fears and frustrations, and wants and desires, and then uses language that hits an emotional hot-button and asks them to take action.

I am aware that I may be leaving some unanswered bits here, but I gotta post this before 12am, and have one minute to go. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss this something though :)

One last interesting thing I heard...
"if you want people to notice your ads, don't design them like ads... design them like the things that people pay attention and lower their defenses to... i.e. news paper articles or blog posts..."