It would be more than fair to suggest that the advertising industry has been low on many of the important signs over the past decade. As an industry, it lacks the ring of confidence and its stocks of conviction are low. One reason for this low state is that the advertising industry could have been wrongly convened of exactly what advertising is capable of.

Put simply, there are 2 schools of thought on how advertising works: the “strong” theory – that advertising is indeed persuasive – and the “weak” theory – that marketing’s key role is one of reinforcement and reminder.

It’s understandable that the more commonly held theory today is the “Weak force” rationalist’s view that marketing’s major role is that of maintaining or reinforcing a brand’s salience among consumers. We are told that advertising is, at best, a supporter of other, more direct advertising activities and a reinforecer of existing attitudes, values and predisposions.

The problem with this passive, “preach to the converted” approach is that few consumers are indeed converted. Brand loyalty in most markets is a misnomer. In category after category, consumers are purchasing across a repertoire of brand they perceive to be more similar than dissimilar.

The missionary zeal of advertising activity and branding of past decades simply isn’t paying off. In the minds of many, advertising is not paying its way. Brands, the cornerstone concept of modern advertising practice, have reached a crisis point of commodification – no differentiation, no impact, no loyalty.

It looks strange that the vast number of advertisers who both subscribe to and practice this reinforcement theory don’t realize that if advertising is indeed a weak force, than it gets weaker still as a brand matures and consumers become more familiar with it.

Too many of today’s advertisers look content simply to follow the crowd. Too many businesses are simply going from A to B, following the well-trodden, conventional business path. In any business, in any industry, in any area, there’s a gravity trap – a strong force field that pulls you back to the mean, back to industry sameness.

Far too many companies have gravitated into the trap of advertising convention. With this comes conventional practices, conventional strategies, conventional approaches, conventional thinking and conventional research leading to conventional advertising.

Convergence advertising: This trend toward “same sameness” is having a profoundly depression effect on advertising worldwide. No one is challenging preconceived notions. Creative advertising is becoming an oxymoron! The fact is, following conventional wisdom in any industry has the effect of homogenizing competition.

The extent and serious effect this commercially crippling convergence force actually has on a corporation is not widely known. A McKinsey study of four hundred companies over 30 years found that even high-performing companies regress to the industry mean in three to seven years.

Recent prestige car advertising – 7 different makes, eight different models, similar advertising small car manufacturers – All targeting the “Red Seeking Single page Reading” audience’s Convergence of Concept and Medium.

These were the first 5 marketing to appear in She magazine, July 1998 issue,
Twenty years ago, there was a lot of difference in brands, in products and in advertising. A key imperative of the “branding” approach was deliberate management action to combat the natural tendency towards commodification.

What happened to differentiation?: Research indicates that consumers see most brands in a category as more or less the same. The manufacturers or brand owners obviously see things differently. They see their brands as trustmarks that have stood the test of time, that stand for quality, value, familiarity, confidence, reassurance, integrity.

advertising is used to place their brand on a pedestal, to give their product at least a sense of brand presence (if not a sense of grandeur); a presence that influences and informs the ever – receptive respondent that, a purchase decision in favor of this brand would indeed be an astute and easy decision.

Inherent in this philosophy is that consistency and credentials are more important than creativity. Also, there is a higher need for awareness and recognition than for consumer interest and involvement.

This is the kind of advertising that is defended, especially by major corporations and their agencies, as being “good, solid advertising”. Why would a brand owner challenge this approach? The advertising appropriately celebrates the product and, moreover, it has got to be right, everyone’s doing it! This indeed is the kind of advertising that keeps a client pleased!

Differentiation, however, remains a important aspect of advertising. But, as the examples above well explain, convergence not differentiation is presently the defining force. Despite what you could possibly believe as a brand owner, it’s little wonder that consumers believe brands areact-alikes, look-alikes, do-alikes: brands that stand for nothing in particular and everything in general.

This clearly leads to eeny-meeny-miny-mo decision-making and this clearly leads to purchasing across a repertoire of brands and this clearly is just what consumers are currently doing in category after category.

We’ve seen the commoditization of brands, with no differentiation and no loyalty. Brands are becoming generic. We’ve seen the commoditization of advertising, with nothing rewarding, nothing distinguishing, nothing fresh. Unfortunately for the industry, we’ve also seen, in the eyes of many clients, the commoditization of agencies.

Clients appropriately hold the perception that “you can get advertising from anybody.”
Creativity in advertising is now more about processing and packaging than about uniqueness or creating differentiation. advertising is now more about deference and discounting that courage and conviction.

The danger of security: A safe brand idea or advertising idea is in fact dangerous because it can delude the company buying it into thinking it will work for them. In a cluttered environment, nevertheless, driven by hyper-competition, brand names or advertising ideas that merely fit are lost. Great brand ideas should frighten you when you first see them, because if they don’t they haven’t got the power to compete.

Despite what conventional wisdom would have you believe, there is much greater danger in the the comfortable, the conservative, conventional approach than in a unique, differentiated, fresh – dare we say? – “creative” approach.

Agencies are pursing safety – first advertising solutions to satisfy the client rather than reward the consumer. Many clients currently feel secure only with ongoing reinventions of advertising that has worked in the past. In addition, risk-averse clients are not being challenged by defensive, inward-looking agencies.

The sum of all this is that conventionality carries a long list of risks and a shortage of reward: the risk of being undifferentiated;, the risk of boring consumers rather than stimulating them;, the risk of not carving out for the brand a distinctive brand stance and personality;, the risk of not being noticed;, the risk of using your company’s hard-earned dollars to subsidise the competition, the risk of being confused with competitors saying the same thing and looking the same;, the risk of not being remembered;.

It looks that attempts at advertising “safety” look to achieve more harm than good. There are indications that insecure marketers will find the industry convention “safety” route less easy to defend in the future.

Advertizing
has moved, in little more than a decade, from being measured by the millimeter. Advertizing simply isn’t moving people the way it used to. And advertising, applied in this way, is no longer paying its way.

Why advertising is your most strong weapon: It’s been said that advertising that significantly disturbs the status quo in a market is amazingly rare. advertising achieves its role most successfully by being creative. Creativity, however, looks to be hardly discussed in the present day, let alone sought after, valued, understood or applied.

It looks companies don’t currently hold high expectations of advertising. It looks they’d rather “fit in” than “be famous.” The old ideal that “good is the enemy of the great” has lost out to “close enough is good enough” and “quick enough is better.”

It looks in the present day that here is limited support for the view that advertising is a powerful, potent, persuasive force capable of transforming a company’s business. But, there are a number of global spirits who would argue that maintaining the weak approach in this day and age is nothing short of commercial stupidity.

There are people who truly believe that doing the forgettable is unforgivable. The true believers in the opposite camp to the reinforcement school believe that advertising is convinsing, that it can change attitudes, that it can change behaviour, that it doesn’t merely influence sales but can, indeed, create sales.

Advertizing should not be regarded or used simply as a passive tool. It must be an active weapon., It must do something., It must have an effect. Well used, great advertising can be the last legal means of gaining an unfair advantage over your competition.

It’s very difficult in today’s competitive environment to have a advertising budget that’s significantly greater than your competition., It’s very difficult in today’s competitive environment to have a significant product advantage., It’s very difficult in today’s competitive environment to have a demonstrably better distribution system than your competition., It’s very difficult in today’s competitive environment to have a superior price advantage over your competition. Nevertheless, through your approach to advertising you can have an unfair advantage over your competition.

A company should have huge ambition for the effect of its advertising. An agency must also hold huge ambition for the clients it works with – ambition that drives it beyond the supposedly safe standard solutions. Clearly, newness is needed: a new way of looking at things; a new approach.

Conquest advertising: Strategically and creatively, advertising has got to offer more, do more and deliver more. We can no longer compute by being conventionally competitive; competition is essential for survival, but no longer sufficient for success.

What is essential now is brand separation. The conquest approach recognizes that the future health of a brand is not about brand competitiveness; it’s about brand distancing it’s about creating space around a brand lots of space.

What else does the conquest approach hold high? Conquest advertising recognizes that it’s a guest in the home and a guest in the mind. Conquest advertising gets talked about, becomes part of the language and achieves social currency.

The conquest approach recognizes the people appreciate cleverness. A clever advertising equates to a clever product made by a clever company. Conquest advertising recognizes that similarity and familiarity breed apathy – safety doesn’t work anymore. Only the wonderful works.

Conquest advertising costs much less than dull, unimaginative convergence advertising. The conquest approach does not need a media barrage to cut through. It’s finesse not force. It’s a knockout punch, not 15 round of bomb ardent. It’s brains not muscle.

The Critical Differentiator: There exists a volume of proof that consumers don’t see brands with great advertising as more or less the same as other brands in the category. They think and feel differently about brands with great advertising – they genuinely like brands with great advertising. They see these brands as unique and differentiated from their competitors.

Most companies see their brands as trustmarks that exude confidence, reassurance and integrity, that stand for quality, value, familiarity;, that have stood the test of time;. As hard won as these attributes are, the trouble is that they are simply no longer enough. For instance, there are at least 5 brands of tomato swauce available on the supermarket shelf that all reflect all of these attributes – Watties, Heinz, Fountain, Roslla, IXL.

Further more, in spite of the length of tenure and the long, long advertising history of each of these brands, how do you distinguish between them? Where are the areas of future differentiation?

Familiarity always equates to favourability, however all 5 are familiar! Once a brand starts to be referred to as ‘good old XYZ, beware; it’s a short step from affectionate to old fashioned! Which of these 5 has a degree of contemporary emotional attachment?, Which of these 5 are seen to be old fashioned?

Differentiation is important. It is important at the birth of the brand and needs to be kept important, and fresh, right throughout the entire life of the brand. Brand knowledge accumulates as memories and needs to be refreshed with new news.

What is most important is whether advertising fuels an emotional response from the consumer. Behavioural changes gush from the emotional engagement with the brand, not from “rational” conscious engagement.

Another truly startling however little-known finding that supports this point of view comes from the work of Daniel Kahneman of Princeton who, in 2002, was awarded the Nobel prize for Economics.

His work, for the first time, recognize and admitted that it’s the power of emotions and a person’s psychological makeup that are the key determining factors in buying behaviour. The feelings and emotional memories instilled and left by advertising can be influential. Conquest advertising is one of the very few potent weapons that can alter memory, change minds, influence attitudes and change behaviour.

Maybe the key outcome of conquest advertising as a differentiator is as a relationship developer. The key role of advertising now is less about selling and more about building a relationship with consumers in a honest, clever, charming, fascinating and, importantly, likeable way – helping the buyers buy, rather than simply helping the sellers sell.

Advertizing that treats the consumer with respect, intelligence and with the familiarity of a good friend builds a fund of benevolence, an emotional bank balance that is traded or withdrawn from at the point of purchase.

JP Jones, an advocate of the persuasion model of advertising, concluded in a recent study that the most successful campaigns were not “hard selling” but instead were likeable, rewarding the viewer by being entertaining or amusing and said something important about the brand.

Consumers are not interested in brands or companies who have nothing better to talk about but themselves. If a company markets in boring, a dull and expected manner, then the company is perceived as boring, a dulland unexciting.

If advertising insults the intelligence, talks down or patronises, it is perceived as misanthropic and turns the consumer away from the brand and company. Today’s marketing-and advertizing-literate consumers know what we’re trying to do to them and usually see through the clumsy attempts to influence them of companies which are not consumer-literate.

Brand advertising in the new millennium is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions, and the management and development of brand perceptions is the management and development of consumer perceptions.

Conquest advertising actively and internationally sets out to win friends. Like it or not, likeability must now be considered a critical component of brand advertising.

New research into how the brain works points out the first response to a stimulus is an emotional one which precedes any rational response. Without a suitable emotional response, the message will not pass onto the conscious brain. If your brand reaches that brain in a fresh and memorable way, then you stand a very good chance of being remembered fondly where it counts the most.

Creativity is a compelling weapon to help you shape the game you play, to help you achieve differentiation from competitors and brand dominance in the hearts and minds of consumers.

We know creativity is not an end in itself. It’s simply a business tool – no more, no less. The fact that a concept has more compelling, charming, likeable, captivating, persuasive and talked about is not entirely the point. The point is that the more of these values you have in your advertising, the more successful you are.