The Desire for Instant Gratification
One of the most common mistakes in advertising.Most advertisers like to believe that advertising is like a bubble-gum machine. You put your money in, turn the handle, and out come the results.
IT’S NOT LIKE THAT!
The decision a person makes today is very rarely influenced by the ads she heard today, this week, or even this month. You can attract the transactional customer that way, but the longer you keep doing what works immediately, the less and less well it will work.
It’s a law of the universe. It’s true in agriculture, it’s true in physics, it’s true in chemistry, and it’s true in advertising.
Ask your Doctor how to feel good, and he’ll look you squarely in the eye and say, “Eat right and exercise.” Yet for every dollar spent in fitness centres, people spend nineteen dollars on cocaine. The reason? Two seconds after you snort cocaine you feel like Superman. Two weeks of diet and exercise just makes you sore and hungry.
The desire for instant gratification is harmless enough if the only thing it leads you to do is pay higher prices at a convenience store. But heaven help you if you demand instant gratification from your advertising! The businessperson looking for a financial quick fix will soon discover the cocaine of advertising, a four-letter magic chant:
Sale! Sale! Sale!
Good advertising is painful at first because you don’t see immediate results. The impatient business owner will usually snort a little ad cocaine and then get defensive about it: “How can this be bad for me? I’ve never done better!”
But just as the junkie never stops to consider how the drug is destroying his physical health, the business-owner never stops to consider how “Sale! Sale! Sale!” undermines his business health. The first dose of ad cocaine makes him feel great. So does the next, and the next, and the next – though it takes larger and larger doses to get the same effect. Therefore, it’s almost impossible to convince the addict he has a problem, even though he started with only “Twenty Percent Off” and has now progressed to “Half Price.”
Successful companies don’t spend their ad dollars training their customers to wait for a sale.
Do you?
Price Promotions
Summary of a report from the Research & Development Initiative.
Does your organization spend a lot of resources on price promotions? The latest price promotion report discusses the effects of price promotions on a product's long-term sales and profit potential.
In brief, price promotions:
1. Do not attract new customers
2. Do not lead to extra subsequent sales
3. Do not affect repeat buying loyalty
4. Do not reach many customers.
Does your organization spend a lot of resources on price promotions? The latest price promotion report discusses the effects of price promotions on a product's long-term sales and profit potential.
In brief, price promotions:
1. Do not attract new customers
2. Do not lead to extra subsequent sales
3. Do not affect repeat buying loyalty
4. Do not reach many customers.
HOWEVER, price promotions do produce up and down sales blips at a great cost.
Professor Andrew Ehrenberg, Professor of Marketing at South Bank University, London created the R&D Initiative in 1997; prior to this Ehrenberg spent more than 20 years as Professor at London Business School.
This report was also published in 1994, Journal of Advertising Research, 34, July-August, pp. 11-21. “The After-effect of Price-related Consumer Promotions,” by Ehrenberg, A, Hammond, K and Goodhardt, G.J
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