Brad Petersen

Why Super Bowl Sunday is Such a Perilous Day for Business Owners

by Brad Petersen

I love watching the Super Bowl every bit as much as the next guy (or gal for that matter).  My friends and I all get together, play flag football, eat Mexican food, drink beer and enjoy the game. It’s a lot of fun and I enjoy every minute of it.

But as great as Super Bowl day is, it can actually be a perilous day for business owners and marketing executives.  Why?  Because they watch a series of entertaining — and often hilarious — commercials, laugh about them with their friends, and then decide they want their advertising to be entertaining and hilarious, too.

No surprise there.  It’s way more fun and exciting to do advertising the Super Bowl way — and it gives you a certain satisfaction to picture others enjoying the entertaining nature of your ads.

Memorable Ads… Forgotten Products

But there’s a snag.  You see, with rare exceptions, being funny and entertaining in your advertising simply doesn’t move product.  In fact, you’ll find that people often don’t even remember what product or service was being sold by the entertaining commercial they loved so much.

One of the best examples of the dangers of entertaining instead of selling in your advertising comes from one of the most celebrated advertising campaigns in history.   The campaign — created by the TWBA/Chiat/Day advertising agency — featured a series of entertaining ads for Nissan USA and featured dolls that looked like Ken, Barbie and GI-Joe riding around in toy Nissans to the sounds of Van Halen’s “You Really Got Me.”

The commercials were, without a doubt, funny and entertaining, and were almost universally hailed as the best ads of the year.  The copywriters and art directors behind them were even invited to appear on Oprah.

Memorable Ads… Crashing Sales

Yet despite the apparent success of this campaign, during the first month it ran, Nissan’s sales fell by 2.7% compared to the previous year.  The next month, sales fell 10.2% compared to the previous year.  And the next month saw a 4% decline.  Not exactly the results you’d expect from a beloved multi-million dollar ad campaign.

Perhaps a headline in the Wall Street Journal summed it up best:  “Nissan’s Ad Campaign Was a Hit Everywhere but in the Showrooms.”

Meanwhile, Toyota — one of Nissan’s primary competitors — continued to run benefit-oriented ads featuring fat rebates.  These ads weren’t very entertaining… they didn’t win any awards and nobody got on Oprah for writing them.  However, they were getting bodies into the dealerships and selling cars.

It didn’t take long of course for Nissan to see the error of its ways and to return to more traditional benefit-oriented advertising.  And lo and behold, within a month sales had increased 10% over the previous year. And the next month sales increased 15%.

How to Create Ads that Move Products

The lesson is clear:  If you want to move product, your advertising must sell that product.    And that means ads and sales letters that tell your prospects all the benefits your product will bring them and all the reasons why they should buy it right away.

Of course, if you can do this in a funny and entertaining way, more power to you.  But always, always, always test those entertaining ads against your more traditional versions — and track the results religiously.  Do that, and the market will quickly tell you whether or not your advertising is effective and worth continuing.

by Brad Petersen

I talk to business owners from time to time who get caught up in the idea of building a brand for their product or company.

Most of them don’t really know what branding is. They believe it’s about repeatedly putting their company name in front of prospects in the hopes that those prospects will remember them when it comes time to buy.

So they’ll create a fancy logo, letterhead or sign, and plaster it on their business card, in their advertising and in their customer communications.

And, more often than not, the results are dismal, so they give up on advertising (and branding) altogether, figuring it’s a waste of time and money.

When Branding Makes Sense… and When it Doesn’t

This is both a misunderstanding of branding and a lousy way to advertise your business.

In the simplest terms, real branding involves building a market identity around your company name, logo or signage that immediately makes people think good things about their company and gets them to choose your product or service when it comes time to buy.

And you cement this brand image into your prospects’ minds by hitting them again and again with your advertising — and then, of course, by delivering on your promise, which further cements the brand image in the prospect’s mind.

For big, consumer companies with deep pockets brand building makes perfect sense. There’s probably no other approach that will work for the likes of Coca-Cola, Proctor and Gamble (Tide, Cascade, Charmin) and Nike.

Millions of people buy their products every single day and they’re more likely to buy from names they know and trust — which largely explains why brand-name products routinely outsell generic products, even when the generic is just as good.

The Terrible Truth About Branding

The problem for the small business owner is that building a brand that resonates the way Tide or McDonald’s does costs millions upon millions of dollars. And it’s not as if you can stop once you’ve built the brand. You have to spend millions more to sustain it.

Worse yet, it takes time. I recently read an article on branding that lauded Nike’s branding strategy. The problem is, it took Nike 15 years to build the brand we know and love today. I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t have that kind of time!

Now, of course, to build a local brand you can probably get away with spending less money and a lot less time — but that doesn’t mean it’s time or money well spent.

The Profitable Alternative to Building a Brand

So instead of using your advertising to build a brand, use it to drive sales — immediate sales. And that means crafting benefit-oriented direct response ads, sales letters, e-mails and landing pages.

Direct response advertising reveals all the benefits your prospects will get from responding to your ad, make a specific offer (buy now, request more info, come in and save 10%, etc.) and ask them to take action immediately by calling you, going to your web site or stopping by your store.

Direct response advertising may not be as romantic and exciting as building a brand, but for a small business owner, it’s more effective at making the cash register ring right now. And you don’t have to mortgage your kids to pay for it.