Shut up! – The client may want to say ‘Yes’!
Their sales methods range from bully boy tactics to emotional blackmail and go some way to explain the poor public reputation of the advertising profession. If you had to defend it at dinner parties, or in the pub, as I do, you’d know what I mean.
Take the bully boys (and girls) the telesales people. The object of their sales pitch seems to be to get through it without drawing breath and railroad you into a sale or a service agreement before you can get a word in edgeways. One even spent ten minutes selling me roof insulation before I could explain to him that I lived in a ground floor flat! Bettered only by the guy who tried to sell solar panels to my father, “You can get your money back in under 30 years Mr Taylor”, before bothering to enquire his age – he was 85 years old at the time of the call!
They anticipate, and are trained to delete, every objection and make a case you can’t argue your way out of. But winning the argument doesn’t mean winning the sale. Another bit of sales lore has it: “He who is convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”. Even when a customer is pre-disposed to buy, he can be talked out of it by a prolonged sales pitch. My old boss always wanted a sign in the conference room that said: ‘Stop talking, the client might want to say yes’, to curb the enthusiasm of our more verbose account handlers!
Now consider the emotional blackmailers – afternoon TV seems to be a favoured spot for them, perhaps because they judge old age pensioners to be a soft touch. But you could include high street ‘chuggers’ – charity muggers – in this category as well.
There are a couple of commercials on afternoon TV that I simply cannot watch. And no doubt that is their intention: to shock and propel me into donating. One is for abused animals – mangy, skeletal, and lame – and the other is for children with cleft palates, on which the camera dwells in extreme close up, for what seems to be ages.
Its true that towards the end of the ad you catch a couple of short glimpses of children who have successfully undergone remedial surgery, but wouldn’t it have been more inspiring and motivational to major on the success stories and the transformed lives of the beneficiaries. The various sponsor-a-child charities are a model of how the compassion and engagement of sponsors can be won.
But I digress. My broad point is that advertising should invite and persuade, not corner, and coerce.
Obviously, your work needs to get noticed. It’s the first, and most important, step to making that all important customer connection/sale. The trouble is that with everybody indulging in ‘shock and awe’ tactics, you end up in an inevitable race to the bottom of the creative barrel and, regardless of what their agency research might show, I think that these protagonists should be doing better than simply shocking their victims into a donation/signing up and relying on inertia thereafter.
Scott Adams once wrote that ‘creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep’. Well, these ads certainly got the first bit right!
If you get both the creativity and art correct, you’ll not only make your point, and hopefully gain a sale/enquiry, but you can look forward to repeat business from customers who feel comfortable dealing with you. Press gang them and you might succeed once. But show me a press-ganged sailor who voluntarily stays on board. He’s more likely to jump ship at the first opportunity!
