The Big, Bad Bandwagon of Vagueness and Lameness
I don’t know if the commercials we get in Canada are the same as the ones that y’all get in the States, but it seems like “challenges” are becoming all the rage in the advertising industry. Febreze has one — take the Febreze 7-Day Challenge and your home will smell better. William Shatner and his homeboys at All Bran have one saying that you’ll lower your cholesterol by some marginal number of points if you eat their yummy cereal. Now Activia, a yogurt by Danone, is running one.
Take the Activia 14-day challenge — one yogurt a day for two weeks — and if it doesn’t work, you can have your money back. All ten bucks of it.
So what’s the challenge? Where’s the if-then statement? If you eat their yogurt for 14 days, what happens? You get skinny? You finally get used to it? Your prince will come?
If you’re going to come up with a blatant marketing ploy for your home business — and there’s nothing wrong with that, we all do it — back it up, for God’s sake. If you’re going to have a satisfaction guarantee, define satisfaction. If you’re inviting your customers to participate in a challenge, give them an if-then statement. Make it juicy.
We’ve been bombarded by marketing messages for decades now, and the advent of the internet has made the bombardment so much worse. If your message is vague and wimpy, it will blend in with all the other vague and wimpy marketing messages and your money will go down the toilet.
Don’t be vague. Vague is lame. That’s all.
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I hear ya. Commercials are no better in the States.
“More people choose Product X!”
… as opposed to what?
Your competitor (nope, otherwise you would have said that)
sudden and painful death?
A sentence clause is not a marketing statement!
/rant
That was meant to be two bullet points …
As opposed to …
* Your competitor? (nope, otherwise you would have said that)
* sudden and painful death?
… sorry that it made it look like ‘your competitor’s sudden and painful death’ … though that might be more catchy …
Oooh, good one, Dave. I forgot all about the “more people choose…”. I also like the ones where they say “4 out of 5 [dentists, pediatricians, whatever] recommend…”.
I saw that on Cheerios the other day. 4 out of 5 pediatricians recommend Cheerios as a snack for children. Why doesn’t the fifth doctor? Why do 20% of pediatricians NOT recommend it? What’s wrong with Cheerios? What are they not telling us?
Oh, I saw that on a fake commercial on Not Necessarily The News years ago:
“4 out of 5 doctors prefer Bayer aspirin for headaches. That’s why I choose the 5th doctor. He’ll give me all the drugs I want, and when the insurance money comes in, we split the profits! And that makes me feel better than any Bayer aspirin *ever* could …”
What about all those drug companies that don’t TELL you what the drug is even FOR?
“Hey, ask your doctor about ‘trycrapacol.”
Why do I need this? Do I have a disease I’m not aware of? Depression… high blood pressure… bad breath?
What?? Tell me!!
Ooh, I forgot about those ones. I think if there’s a young woman in a sun dress with her arms spread out wide in a field of wildflowers, it’s for depression. Although it could be an allergy medication. Tough to say.
Well, Activia’s supposed to just make you poop more regularly, so that’s probably the challenge. Maybe they didn’t want to explicitly state that? “If you don’t shit everyday for 14 days straight, we’ll give you your money back!” or “If you can’t set a clock to your shit routine, we’ll refund your money!”
Doesn’t matter. I still get what you’re saying.
Hmmm…the young woman in a field of flowers. Isn’t that the herpes commercial? =)
Right on!! Great products have failed because of dumb marketing and non-products have succeeded because of good marketing. Perhaps you remember hearing about the “Pet Rock.” Whenever I build a marketing plan, I start by remembering a speach by Paul Revson, “Revlon.” He said, “I don’t sell cosmetics, I sell hope.”
@ George: great point. Isn’t that the whole concept of selling anyway. Selling feelings?
To be honest, I hate commercials and here in Australia they are so bad, that if you watch TV you’ll get them every 5 bloody minutes. At least it feels that way. So in essence a 90 minute movie lets you waste 40 minutes more just because of those.
Thank god for private TV, at least they give us some peace.
We get the challenge ads over here in the UK, even though a recent documentary took a stab at showing they rarely work and may make some people “worse”…
@ Rachelle: You’re spot on, we have a similar Activia ad in the UK and they actually spell out the benefit in that one - in their version it’s 14 days to ‘improve your digestive transit’ (i.e. make you shit like a racehorse)
Naomi, I love this post. Ads are shite but so many people seem to love them. I turn the volume off whenever an ad break starts and if people are round my house watching telly they think I’m some kind of kook. “Why??” they exclaim, “Adverts are fun!”
Glad I’m not the only one who hates the crapness of them. (Car ads are my most loathed btw: pointless, blokey, misogynistic, metal-porn bollocks of the highest order)
The vagueness is supposed to keep you from wondering what they’re selling while they insert their name into your memory. So many of these people believe the “no bad publicity” thing. Don’t they realize how often the name gets associated with unmemorable irritability? I haven’t watched television for years, but just from magazine ads I can have a “Oh, _Them_, blech!” reaction without even remembering what They sell.
Similar to “4 out of 5 doctors…” is “Voted best So-and-so three years running!” Who voted, and why should I care about their vote?
But, yeah, those vague ads drive me a little nuts. And, by extension, my wife, too, because I’m always talking to the TV and to billboards (!). “Better than what!?” “Brighter than what!?” “Voted by who?!”
‘Just let it go, Matt.’
“Improve you digestive transit”! Ha! Love it. I wonder how long it took for them to come up with that?
As a wordsmith, I glory in the ways that people say stuff and say nothing at the very same time. I also took some critical thinking courses in University, and it’s always lovely to point out to people exactly why something that sounds incredibly crucial really isn’t at all.
The media uses spin doctor strategies all the time. “Nearly 10,000 people were struck with the deadly fluviruskilleveryone disease in 2007. Measures of protection are vital…”
Considering that the population of Canada is 32 billion or something insane like that (and we’re an underpopulated country), those 10,000 people don’t amount to much.
And yet, everyone rushes off for masks, gloves, antibacterial products and acts like the second coming of Christ is about to happen and we’re all going to die before Friday.
Think with your brains. Listen to what’s being said - and what isn’t.
@James -
That reminds me of what Stephen Colbert said to Tony Snow “You say nothing like no one else can.”
It’s just as bad in the UK.
I get quite a chuckle whenever I see something like “Can help regulate halitosis as part of a diet of mostly breath mints” on the latest yoghurt or cereal box.
Can help…? I don’t want can help! I want will help or proven to help.
Not that I have a breath problem, of course.
this post and the comments made me laugh in my cube so i had to post - I LOVE ADS! sometimes they are the best part of a tv show… the stupid ones make me change the channel.
i am truly tired of the car insurance ads though - the talking lizard and cavemen should be collecting retirement. Somehow they all save you $500 over their competitors. Amazing.
The only good car ad I have seen was the VW Rabbit commercial with the multiplying cars!
The best shockingly vague car ad claim I’ve heard is this: “Our latest model is now 80% quieter”.
It was plastered all over billboards in the UK until a newspaper (who’d obviously thought “80% quieter than what?”) ran an exposé and the car manufacturer finally owned up.
Turns out that they weren’t comparing the road noise from the latest model to the previous one as the ad implied; they were comparing the road noise inside and outside the car! If they’d been truthful, the spot should have read: “Our latest model is 80% quieter inside than outside.” How’s that for a sales pitch?
I’d love to see a book on the excuses that ad people give their wives and husbands: “Darling, I might be 6 hours late coming home, but the stats are in — I’m 120% less likely to be sleeping with my secretary than you are.”
How is it possible that I saw this blog post title in my feedreader hidden among about 200 unread feeds and I immediately thought, “Yay, Naomi put up a new post!”. You must be good.
I thought the commercials in Spain just really sucked and now I see we have the same Activa one. Nice. Here in Spain it’s even more torturous than in the states. 15 minutes of commercials every 30 minutes or so. I don’t even watch them most of the time and go do something else.
I think one that my husband and I hate in particular is this perfume commercial with an Avril Lavigne song. I’m not joking that it’s been showing constantly for 4 years. Why do they have to do that to us?
I totally agree about being vague. Now that we are so bombarded with marketing, I agree that’s it’s more important than ever to be clear. Especially for people like me that have no patience.
I agree that the vague challenges and guarantees are silly, but I think the marketing goal is pretty clear: get people to adopt a new habit (hence many of the challenges are 21 or 30 days) and then they’re committed to being a regular customer.
The guarantee is vague because so few people take the sponsors up on it. And they don’t care about the reasons of those who do, because of the silent majority who either continue as regular customers or just as occasional customers.
Otherwise, I agree that vagueness is lame. :)
My favorite is the herpes ~ whitewater rafting correlation. Brilliant!
@James, I’m going to start a band and call it Metal-Porn Bollocks.
That is all.
@ Sonia - As long as it’s not MenwPens Writes Bollocks, I’ll support you all the way.
One of my favorite commercial intros is “everyone is talking about.”
No, no they aren’t. Sorry. Way to blow creditability in the first 2 seconds of the spot.
@James: “Digestive transit.” That’s a new one on me!
This reminds me of a billboard I saw in Florida some time back. It was for a vasectomy clinic that “guaranteed results - or your money back!” Well, I’ve got news for you: if a vasectomy failed, I’d want more than the surgical fee back. How ’bout the cost of raising a little rascal for the next 18-20 years? Now that’d be a true “money back” guarantee. :-)
I’m always taken by the ones that say If We Don’t Deliver What We Promise in 30 Days…we’ll give you 30 days free! Or the thing I heard years ago to the effect that if you are not satisfied, return the unused part of the product, and we’ll refund the unused part of your money.
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Naomi-
I switched from Safari to Firefox, with a new RSS feed reader, and somehow fell off the ittybiz bandwagon. Drat.
Anyway, I enjoyed this post, and it caught my eye especially because I have a challenge on my site: The Remembrance Challenge.
I think most things like this are totally lame, but of course I don’t think mine is, in the most and best of self-center ways. :)
But I did take a lot of time thinking about it- am I doing this just to hook people? Or is there some benefit to taking a challenge? In this instance i decided that I was trying to help people cultivate a habit of STOPPING, connecting in their heart, and just generally not running themselves ragged as they work their businesses.
Anyway, aside from blatant self-promotion, this run-on comment is merely to say: I agree, and I’m glad to have remembered to add your feed back.