Law Of Selling

The Law of SellingBy David Trott

Can anyone remember the purpose of advertising: why we get paid to do what we do?

Are we TV sitcom writers: is it to make people laugh? Are we gag writers for observational comedians: putting our finger on telling truths?

Are we prose stylists, delivering beautifully written passages of literature?

I’d like to suggest a terribly old—fashioned view of the fundamental, purpose of what we do, that I know will get me laughed out of every trendy media bar and restaurant in Soho.

lt’s the ‘S’ word (gasp). (“What ? You mean talking people into buying things, like a shop assistant? Man, where did you goto university?”)Yes, I know we don’t do anything as crass as that anymore.

Nowadays we‘re much more sophisticated: we ‘Build Brands’.We don’t look at the sales figures, we look at the tracking scores.

Never mind if anyone’s buying it, have we won an IPA Effectiveness Award, or a D&AD pencil? We don’t sell products to consumers anymore.Now we sell OUR product: advertising.

And we sell it to our clients and peers: in Soho, Cannes, or Lurzer’s Archive.

Not only hasn’t the Emperor got any clothes, none of the rest of us have either. I thought we’d reached the zenith (your zenith is my nadir) of this type of non-advertising during the dotcom boom.When computer nerds with fistfuls of cash wandered into agencies and said ‘Make something we like, man.’....So we did.

Great pieces of film that all the new media types loved.

Of course we didn’t design to do anything so crude as telling consumers what the product was, or why they should buy it. So guess what, they didn‘t.

The dotcom boom was the time people started to believe you just had to ‘build brand’, not sell product. When the dotcoms disappeared, the non-advertising industry built up on their backs stayed around. Teaching a new generation of marketing trainees that the ‘S’ word is dinosaur thinking.

What really clever people do is ‘brand building’.Brand diamonds, brand keys, brand doughnuts, brand personality, brand profile, brand signature, brand architecture, brand onion, brand halo. Say the word ‘brand’ often enough and everything will be okay.

Now, I’m not saying that ‘building the brand’ isn’t ever the answer. What I am saying is, it isn’t always the answer. But it’s become a simple knee-jerk solution to avoid the discomfort of thinking about the ‘S’ word. lt has become a religion. And the purpose of all religions is to avoid thinking. To keep you in a state of belief and superstition. Which is what ‘brand’ has become, the advertising superstition. Like touching wood.

Of course there are great brands which can charge a premium for any product with their name attached. But (and, like anything that questions religion, this is going to sound like heresy) before they were great brands they were great products.

How the brands got built, was the advertising sold products in an appropriate way. (The ‘brand building’ is the part that’s underlined.)

They couldn’t sell the brand, because the brand

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didn’t exist. All that existed was the product, and the name. So they sold that in an appropriate way. And a brand got built. Now, once a brand’s built, you can sell the brand because it exists. But before the product builds the brand you can‘t sell the brand, because it doesn’t exist.

And it’s silly to sell something that doesn’t exist, isn’t it? So why are so many of us still doing something that’s silly?

Well, let’s lake a look at how religions work. The truly blessed are those who have faith, those who believe without questioning.

But what if you’re a little confused about what a ‘brand’ is, and how it works’?

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 mysterious to the mind of man, and ‘brand’ is all powerful. The problem is, if you substitute belief for thinking, you believe your answer is always right in every situation, no matter what. And, of course, it isn’t. Which is why we have so much expensive advertising failing all the time.

One problem with blindly following this route is that, handled lazily, many brand values are the same within a particular market. (How many times have you seen the brand defined as ‘modern, approachable, and honest’ on the brief?)

So if all the brands in the market are selling similar brand values, who wins?

It’s a no-brainer because, unless you change the dynamics of the market, the market leader must win more from any market growth.

So, given that there‘s usually only one brand leader in any market, pure brand advertising is going to be wrong more often than it’s right. But if ‘brand’ advertising isn’t infallible, what else is

there?I’d like to suggest thinking for ourselves as an alternative to blind faith.

The problem, as we’ve seen with ‘brand’, is that we have a whole industry of people dedicated to making what we do as complicated as possible. Dedicated to making it virtually impenetrable to any outsiders.

We need to demystify the process. We need to give everyone access to it. So that the best solution wins, not just the most complicated one. We need a device so simple anyone can use it. That’s where what I call the Binary Brief comes in.

FIGURE 1

It’s called ‘binary‘ because all you do is choose between two alternatives, like the zeros and ones of binary code. Like the binary code, it’s fast, and it’s unambiguous.

But the real value of the process is the rigid discipline that you need to apply to the result.

You must only choose ONE of each pair of alternatives.

The questions are ranked in three levels. 1) What? 2) Who? 3) How?

That’s it.

What does the advertising need to achieve? Should we grow the market, and (if we’re number one) take the major share of the increase?

Or should we go up against whoever’s bigger than us, and try to take share from them?

Who should we target? Can we get our current users to buy more of our product, or buy it more

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often? Or should we be looking to get people who‘ve never tried it to switch to it?

How do we do it? Do we have a genuine USP? (A ‘perceived’ USP is fine, but the letter ‘S’ is 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

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 for that market, and are scared to deviate. Brand advertising worked so well for number one, we’d 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.

So the market grows, and number one takes the major share of that growth, thank you very much.

FIGURE 3

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

So how to do that? Well obviously they had to be talking to people about why they should try Pepsi. They had to go for Triallists.



FIGURE 6

Fair enough, but what message was going to get Coke drinkers to change brands?

Well, selling Pepsi according to cola values hadn’t worked.They needed something differentiating. 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 they have better advertising than they’ve ever had, and none of it’s for Coke. So, according to the Binary brief, Pepsi went for: Brand Share, Triallists, USP.

They had to aggressively go for brand share.

FIGURE 7

Meanwhile Coke was more interested in growing the market. They figured they could get much more growth from increasing the overall size of the market, than they could from worrying about taking share from their smaller competitor.

FIGURE 8

So they kept selling Cola values. The problem was everyone, everywhere had already tried Coke, so how do you increase sales? The answer was get existing customers to use more.

FIGURE 9

So the message became: don’t just have a Coke on your own, have one with a friend, it’s much nicer to share. I’d like to buy the world a Coke.Finally, Coke virtually built the cola market, so it could just appropriate all the market values to itself. They must do brand advertising. So, against the Binary brief, Coca Cola went for: Market Growth, Current Consumers, Brand.

FIGURE 10

So that‘s how it works. You make three simple choices and you have one of eight possible advertising strategies. All your advertising is 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



days arguing back and forth over each decision. But at the end, you must have chosen only one of each of the alternatives.

That all sounds simple enough, right? Well it is simple. But it’s not easy. It`s very tough to make those choices. And that’s the whole point. Most 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.

I think we can stop being ashamed of what we do, and pretending we’re doing something else. I think the consumers have worked out what those little films between the programmes are for.

I think they know they’re adverts. They just don’t know: who, what, or why.



Law Of Selling

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