Smart Retail, 3rd Edition

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Marketing for

real people

Tell me what it is, why I’d want one and how to get it. That’s all I give a monkey’s

about. If you can do that in a humorous, dramatic or otherwise attention-grabbing

way then, fine, knock yourself out. Please don’t talk to me in Latin, use obtuse images

or hit me with stuff that goes way over my head because I just don’t care enough about

you or your product to bother trying to understand your clever rubbish.

In that one paragraph you have all the rules of advertising you will ever

need. Be clear, tell people what the benefit to them is and then make it very

easy for them to buy from you. Ad agencies argue that advertising is about

building brands too. There is truth in this but, frankly, brand is built more

powerfully by your shop, your people in it and your store culture. Slick

eye-candy advertising is simply not important.

Basic brands such as easyJet and Poundland tell you what they are for, why

you would want to use them and how to do business with them. Both

those brands are sales heroes. Both are never going to win awards for the

glossiness of their advertising. On the other hand, IKEA and Sainsbury’s

do the same thing but with a bigger budget, and arguably greater creative

finesse, but to the same effect.

Advertising made simple

Media commentator Charlie Brooker wrote in his Guardian blog:

Marketing is the art of associating products with ideas to bamboozle consumers.

People in marketing often talk about the ‘personality’ of a given product. A biscuit

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might be ‘reassuring and sensual’; a brand of shoe may exhibit ‘anarchic yet inquisi-

tive’ tendencies. Marketers have built their worldview on such thinking, despite it

being precisely the sort of babble a madman might come up with following years alone

in an isolated cottage, during which time he falls in love with a fork and decides the

lightbulbs are conspiring against him.’

And, of course, he’s right.

Beauty has its place

There is space for the beautiful – those breathtaking adverts that force

their way into your awareness. But these are very much the exception that

rather proves the rule: you remember these because they are exceptional.

Orange, the mobile phone network, has built a hugely successful brand

without ever showing a picture of a telephone in its advertising (there

was one, once, but Motorola were paying and forced the issue, but even

then the phone featured was only shown as an x-ray image). You might

think this goes against the simple doctrine I’ve outlined here. It doesn’t.

Orange’s adverts always tell you what they are for (mobile communica-

tions), they always focus on one clearly defined benefit at a time (say the

joy of swapping pictures on a mobile), and then they put a great big phone

number up on screen and suggest interested punters might like to ring that

to become an Orange customer.

Marketing things to make and do

Marketing is not a mythical black art, it is nothing more, or less, than a

common sense framework: a framework into which adverts and promo-

tions can be fitted. Marketing theory is actually very simple. The skill,

especially in the case of retail, is not in cleverly executing the practice of

marketing but rather it is in trusting your gut feel to keep things simple.

Marketing is about understanding who your customers are, where they

can be found, what they want, and how much they will pay to satisfy those

wants. That’s really kind of it.

This sets up a series of questions. Who are we selling to? How do we

tell them about our product? What will they pay for it? Notice how these

questions form a chain? The answer to the first informs the second which