Repetition can build reputation

Here’s a quick piece of advice that can make your advertisements really make you money. Repetition builds reputation.

We’d all like one advertisement to do all of our work for us… and sometimes it will. I once created an advertisement for my tour company where I was trying to get over decades of fear for our arch enemy the USSR – the Soviet Union, AKA evil empire.

I took a head on approach, one I often find best. My headline was “Are you afraid to travel to Russia?” To the right is a similar advertisement I just created for another firm now wanting to take people to Russia. The body copy plays positively on that fear and shows how others have fear and if you don’t you’ll get a great adventure, great deals and no crowds to bother you.


We got a huge response. But, we kept running that ad and running and running. It always worked. In fact, while there was a drop off from the first time we ran it, after a few more times of running it in a newspaper the response began to grow.

Why? Some people responded from the shock value. After a while others responded because if we kept advertising we must be someone worthy of taking them on a tour. Our repetition built our reputation. That first year we sold more than $6 million in tours. We did more later.

The lesson is two fold:
1. Work toward the best headline with the most attention grabbing words addressed to the audience as possible. Don’t do a tombstone headline that’s all about you. Make it about them.

and

2. Run the dang advertisement again and again. If you ad doesn’t work the first time, change it. Change it until you get it right. If you have a good product, make the ad about them and not you, grab attention, build them up with benefits, get their emotions going and make it easy to respond (that’s all part of the AIDA code that I’ve taught here), you will make sales.

For heaven sake don’t blame the media you’re using. Somehow others are using it successfully. Why not you? It is because your ad sucks. So, make it unsucky.

If you need me to create an ad for you, I will, but I’m not cheap unless you consider the money you'll make from my ads. My wife Elizabeth does all the graphics because she is an excellent artist with superb taste in colors, spacing and attention grabbing graphics. And, she knows that NO ad is worth its salt that begins the creation process with graphics. I first write the copy and then she makes it come alive.

Too many art directors get it backwards – they create a graphic and let you fit the words around their pictures. Pure foolishness and ego. Words sell. Pictures attract. You can email Elizabeth at our company, Marketing Artists, for a discussion of your advertising needs. Here's her email: lizstoddard@gmail.com

Do the right job in creating the ad and then start building your reputation through repetition.

What's in a Name?

Much Ado is made of choosing a name for a commercial purpose, be that a stage name, a product or service name or the name of a company. This is part and parcel in the discussion many have over "Branding."

Everyone knows of successful brands that have been established and love to tell about Kleenex, Jell-o, RCA and Ford. Household names. So people seek to follow their example.

Bad idea. Branding and selecting the perfect name are Much Ado About Nothing.

Shocking words in the popular work of Branding and Finding the Best Name contest.

Let's make short work of this discussion.

First, Branding. In everything you do, you brand yourself. Over the course of your career or business you'll brand and rebrand and rebrand again. Life changes. Circumstances change. You grow. As you grow, your uniqueness may grow in unanticipated ways, and so your brand grows and changes.

Unless you have $10 million in your "branding budget" and two years or more to create a brand, branding as a singular strategy is a waste of your time. You'll brand gradually but not doing anything more than watching your image to make sure it fits your general essence.

Finding the right name is even easier. There might be a wrong name, but there certainly is no such thing as the right name. Oh, some will wax poetic how wonderful the name for their company, website, or product is, but don't listen. It's propaganda on steroid finding any imaginary facts to justify their decision.

Don't believe it? Just ask yourself what your first reaction was to names like Google, Yahoo, Vonami, Orange Soda, Novell and Omniture. How about WalMart? Some are goofy. Others rather pedestrian and dull. None are descriptive of the product or service. Orange Soda has nothing to do with Fanta or any soft drink.

Yet these are names for billion dollar companies or products. Didn't you yawn, laugh or shrug when you heard them? Imagine the board room where they first came up and some desperate promoter had study group data to prove their name, GoDaddy, was a perfect name for... a website to buy website names. Laughter permeated where boredom didn't trip over deaf ears. Yet, GoDaddy and the rest have now become names sycophants trot out to "prove" there is a right name for you.

Those same folks will say, "But they are so memorable -- you can't forget them!" Sure, now that the companies have spent millions pounding their monikers into our brains we can't drive their names out of our minds.

In Salt Lake City they had the good fortune of DELTA Airlines stepping up to buy the naming rights to their new basketball arena. Easy words in "the Delta Center." But after Delta didn't renew their rights, the rights were purchased by "Energy Solutions." At first the name was universally disliked -- naming an arena after a nuclear waste dump with a name that didn't exactly roll off the tongue. But millions of dollars later everyone blithely calls it Energy Solutions Arena.

So what's the right name for you? Forget this discussion unless you have millions to spend and years to make a name stick. Fretting over a name like Hamlet is a waste of time. Pick a name you like and can live with and tell everyone else it's a great name and get on with your business. Become a self-fulfilling prophet. If you believe it, they'll believe it.

In summary: Brand yourself without spending money and wasting time. Be mindful of the look and language in everything you do so it is consistent and purposeful. Pick a name you like and get on with making sales and yourself famous -- your lustrous name will follow.