It’s 2016 and I’m at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin on the third of eight floors. A video called Sapeurs plays–and I’m transfixed.
It’s set in a bustling, impoverished town in the Congo. One man pushes a wheel barrow, another carries a large bushel of wood, another heaves a block of ice on his shoulder, another dripping with sweat welds in a shop. “In life,” the narrator with a deep, rich voice begins, “you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are.” The Congolese men clean up and adorn themselves in three-piece suits, fedora hats, and wingtip shoes. The “Sapeurs” join in a lively club to dance with joy, confidence, and swagger. “You see, my friends, with every brace, with every cuff link, we say I am the master of my fate.”
Guinness appears only at the end of the video with a clip of beer being poured into a pint glass.
This ad’s honesty makes it powerful. It includes an authentic story of real, admirable people.
Truth sells.
Diageo, the parent company of Guinness, spends billions of dollars per year on advertising. The company hires leading agencies like BBDO to create ads like The Sapeurs. You, however, can profit from honesty on any budget.
In the early 1900s, Claude Hopkins went to brewing school. The advertiser walked through the brewery and asked “Why?” again and again. Hopkins, amazed with all that went into beer making, asked the Schlitz brewer, “Why don’t you tell people these things?” The brewer replied, “Because, the processes are just the same as others use. No one can make good beer without them.” Hopkins created a series of ads that told how Schlitz beer–and all beer–was made. Schlitz jumped from fifth place to “neck-and-neck with first place” in a few months.
Why We Lie
If the truth isn’t impressive, if our products, company story, and performance aren’t that interesting, we lie.
Or, we only sell and market unique, superior products. Honesty is easier if the truth impresses.
The easiest to market are businesses which require no marketing, such as low cost providers. Costco spent less than $100 million on advertising last year; Target spent $1.4 billion. Yet, Costco’s sales are two-and-a-half times higher. Costco can even charge customers for the privilege of buying from it.
We’re not marketing for Costco. We promote businesses that are good, but not so good that they sell themselves. We must find something that is special and different about what we offer.
We must research. Learn as much about the product, its origins, how it’s made, and how people use it. Look for gaps. What do our customers value that our competitors don’t talk about? Find the truth that sells.
Honesty Gratifies
Marketing works because of cognitive biases–systematic patterns of deviation from rationality. A marketer who understands these biases and the techniques to exploit them can convince people to buy almost anything.
I read and reread the marketing bible, Influence by Robert Cialdini. I used techniques from Influence–reciprocity, social proof, commitment and consistency–to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of products and services. Cialdini wrote the book to protect consumers; marketers used it to make money.
If you give someone something, that person feels compelled to reciprocate. Free food samples, software trials, gym membership trials. Letting people try before they buy is an honest way to acquire customers. If your product is terrible, samplers don’t become buyers.
Marketers exploit the reciprocity tendency–like most tendencies–to a dishonorable level. In information businesses, marketers design elaborate webinars to sell courses and coaching programs. The goal is to build within attendees a strong compulsion to reciprocate by giving them free information. By the end, the attendee feels compelled to buy the product offered. If the product, a course or coaching program, is 10 to 20 hours of content, giving a one hour sample of the material on a webinar is OK. However, some marketers provide no useful information on webinars. Instead, they puff themselves up, get people excited, and make people feel like they must buy to get the useful information, all while providing no value to the attendees. Don’t teach the “how”, they advise, only provide the illusion of usefulness. That’s wasting people’s lives.
I’ve pushed Cialdini’s techniques too far. It works, but doesn’t feel good. It makes me hate marketing. I don’t want to spend my life tricking people. Some marketers say that they’re stuff is so good (it’s not) that it’s their duty to convince people to buy it by any means necessary. They trick, cajole, and exploit loopholes in cognition to sell poor quality products. That’s a terrible way to live life.
I tried offering a webinar in which I didn’t embellish. I told the attendees, “This may not work for you. You will have to work hard. Luck is required. Don’t buy this if it’s not right for you.” Sales were decent. Better yet, I felt good about it.
Honesty Pays
David Ogilvy spent three weeks reading about Rolls-Royce. He came across the statement, “at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.” That became the headline for the ad, followed by 607 words of factual copy. Rolls-Royce sales rose 50%.
Later, Ogilvy, via his advertising agency’s team, spent three weeks researching Mercedes. He produced a long, factual advertisement that increased sales from 10,000 cars a year to 40,000.
I used to think it wasn’t possible to produce sales with truthful marketing. It would be difficult to sell wine if you told people that it’s unnecessary, they should drink water instead, wine is basically sugar in a bottle, alcohol contributes to heart disease, and if they drink too much, they might do something stupid like drive drunk and get thrown in jail or worse. While all that is true, I think a better litmus test of how truthful we need to be is offered by David Ogilvy: “Never write an advertisement you wouldn’t want your own family to read.”
How would you feel, knowing all you know about the product, if you were on the other end of the ad? If you drink wine and see it as part of the experience of a good dinner with loved ones, then make your ad about that experience. Tell about how it’s made, the story of the winery and its founders, and what good wine has meant to you. Don’t lie. Don’t say there are only 100 bottles remaining when there are thousands. Don’t say the wine is grown on a small family farm in Italy, when it’s really grown on a large commercial farm in Modesto, California.
“Tell the truth, but make it fascinating.” –David Ogilvy
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