I had big nerd-fun one night this week reading Ogilvy on Advertising from cover to cover. It is filled with copies of print ads from more than thirty years ago that stirred all kinds of memories. The Hathaway shirt man in his eyepatch. The old Sears ads that make you want to fight over who gets to look at the catalog first. Elegant ladies lounging in bubbles while proclaiming “Dove creams your skin while you bathe.”
It’s amazing to me that I haven’t seen those images in over thirty years and, yet, they made me crave things: a certain sense of order, a taste of the exotic, time for a long soak. Ogilvy knew how to create a response. A timeless response, as it turned out.
His secret weapon? Research. Quoted as saying “I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance,” he committed first and foremost to learning everything he possibly could about the industries he represented and their consumers. Every ad made it clear that he understood exactly what the consumer wanted and he demonstrated how that information converted people into loyal customers.
We all want customers. But have we done the research? Do we know enough about our potential clients to make it easy for them to say yes to our offers?
And could our presentation of the offer stand proud thirty years from now?
Here’s my challenge for the comments: share ONE thing that you know for certain that your clients want. Step over what you want to offer for a moment and connect on a primal level with what they truly want, or even better, need.
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By Laurie Foley
Laurie Foley helps solo professionals discover their natural brand so that they can get clear, get noticed and get clients. Sign up to receive your free copy of The Inner Brandifesto, her popular guidebook full of brand-building exercises.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Well said. Organizations often invest so much in talking and so little in asking / listening. Because they *think* they know what their audiences want, based on their experience. While experience is a valuable teacher, research narrows the risk in communication — something David Ogilvy knew well.
(Your blog also made me imagine what a 21st century version of the Hathaway shirt man would look like. An avatar? Maybe wearing a SARS mask?)
Great book and a great question! My true customers want to be seen and acknowledged for something special they have to offer. They’ve got the candle inside, but they don’t know how to let other people see it.
Some fear it, because it is so deeply rooted in who they are that they worry that rejection could be catastrophically painful. Some avoid it, and obfuscate it because they’ve been taught to measure themselves by other people’s yardsticks. But there comes a point for my customers that the fear, the avoidance, the “sensible voices”, the second guessing can’t stack up to the need to light that candle and see it shine. The pain of not being seen for their best self, of not being taken seriously for their humanity, for their own unique flavor of awesome begins to outweigh the risk. But the timing is critical because that candle can burn itself out if it doesn’t get some air. The caterpillar becomes the butterfly in the cocoon, but once transformed it can’t stay in the cocoon. It has to spread its wings or it dies.
So to break it down, I guess I’m saying my customers are caterpillars who aren’t being recognized for being the butterfly that they already know they are.
Great post. My first exposure to marketing, while still in college but needing to figure out what kind of ad to run in a magazine to promote our business, was reading “Ogilvy on Advertising.” I thank the magazine ad rep from so many years ago who helped ensure I started with the right foundation.
I guess the thing that resonates with me is that I’ve seen many time over that people want to focus on what they want to sell and spend so little time thinking what their customers want to buy. I guess it’s because it takes a lot more work to uncover the latter.
.-= Mike Schinkel´s last blog ..25 Best Practices for Meetup Organizers =-.
@Michael – “research narrows the risk in communication” <- This is exactly why people should hire you when they want genius.
@David – Great point about the candle needing air. Love that.
@Mike – Thanks for dropping by! It’s a fascinating thing about entrepreneurs. We *want* to do our thing but we must be able to see the needs of others. Wonder how many people would take this plunge if they really understood that upfront?
@Laurie: “Wonder how many people would take this plunge if they really understood that upfront?”
I wrote a book once. Having known what it was going to take, care to guess if I’d do it again?
.-= Mike Schinkel´s last blog ..25 Best Practices for Meetup Organizers =-.