This should be all in capital letters and with a bunch of exclamation points:
COMMUNICATE!!!!
It may seem obvious or trivial, but by all evidence it is not. When I say “communicate” I mean, what you are trying to say gets across to the person at the other end of the line.
It’s not just words flapping on a page or screen or in someone’s ear. The end result of actual communication is comprehension.
Now if you need a new toaster oven, and I tell you we have cheaper better toaster ovens, that are easy to get, and they last a long time – and if your reaction is “….” – then there’s been no comprehension, has there?
If they got the message, they’d be going “Honey, let’s get one of these new Whizomatic Toaster ovens!” The evidence that communication has occurred is a response. You cause an effect on your audience. Something happens.
I think a lot of people in marketing don’t really believe communication is possible. They just hope with their advertising they can push some button that will get the prospect to buy.
As the man says in the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” He goes on to say that some people you just can’t reach. Well, I’m afraid that’s not a good attitude for a marketer. And it’s just not true.
It may be that only a small percentage of advertising actually reaches. but some does, and some people are very good at it.
If people had the same idea about relationships, there’s be a lot fewer marriages and the race would die out for lack of children.
It all starts with realizing there is a real person your communication is aimed at. The father of modern advertising, Claude C. Hopkins, back around 1910 said he could advertise successfully to the common man because he was one. That was another way of saying, he understood there were real people his ads were aimed at and he understood them – their hopes, their fears, their lives.
The reason most advertising is ineffective, disregarded as “junk mail” or “spam” or even offensive, is because the advertisers are talking to nobody.
And a lot of the craze for AI (Artificial Intelligence) we’re going through right now is because, “you can’t really communicate anyway.” So they try to get a result with automation and sheer volume. But we’ll talk about THAT next week.
