Cutting Through the Clutter

Out Standing in Your Field

In 2003, marketing expert Seth Godin published “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable”; in 2005, the Internet casino Golden Palace took him at his word and painted the URL of their website on 100 Florida cows dyed fluorescent purple and pink.

This approach not appropriate for your client, but it is a strong example nonetheless of how it should be done. A cluttered herd of TV, print, electronic, audio, visual, olfactory impulses—an estimated 3,000 ads from all sources—stampede through the brains of the average consumer every day. To cut through that clutter, you must make your message remarkable.

Which is simple to say, but more complicated to do. Here are some tips for delivering your message and making it stick:

Play to people’s emotions.

To the great benefit of advertisers everywhere, all people share similar emotional needs: to feel attractive, to feel fit and healthy, to be liked, to feel secure, to save embarrassment, to avoid feeling guilty. Facts matter in ads, but they matter because they can generate and reinforce emotion.

When the product you are selling is a change in dangerous behaviors—for example, when you want people to buckle their seat belts, pay attention while driving, or not drive impaired—some emotional buttons become prominent than others. In these cases, the needs to feel healthy and safe, and to avoid guilt or embarrassment, are obvious emotional targets.

Know your audience.

How people respond emotionally depends on who they are. Individual sensitivities vary depending on age, income and the place people call home. Many different people may agree that recycling is a good thing to do, but it may appeal to a 70-year-old man in Tulsa in different ways than an 18-year-old woman in Taos.

For example, research indicates that males 21 to 24 are, as a group, less likely to worry about the physical danger of driving under the influence of alcohol, and more likely to respond to messages that stress the danger of losing money or freedom.

Don’t overplay your hand.

When asking people to stop dangerous behaviors, the temptation is strong to appeal to negative emotions like fear and guilt. Guilt ads make us feel guilty, but they don’t necessarily change behavior. In fact, argues John O’Shaughnessy in his book “The Marketing Power of Emotion,” feeling guilt “can serve as an indirect way of satisfying perceived obligations to take action without actually doing so.”

Fear can also be overdone. Too much automotive mayhem may have the same numbing effect as the 15th viewing of a slasher movie. When playing to fear, again, play to the specific fears of your audience—and think Hitchcock, not “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.”

Be direct.

You’re going to be limited by time and space in what you can do. Tolstoy gets 1,000 pages, you get 30 seconds or a Web page sidebar. To make your message clear within those limits, you have to be direct.

Entertain.

We don’t remember Geico just because of the gecko, we remember it because he’s a smart, down-to-earth gecko with a second-rate cockney accent. Is highway safety too important a subject for humor? Visit bigmonsterstrikesback.com to see how effectively, and memorably, laughter can reinforce the message. If you want to stand out in the big pasture of advertising messages, consider the color purple.