Consumer Confidence is Key

Confidence is extremely important to you—more important than quality, than selection, than price, than service. Confidence will be your ally. And commitment, as proven by consistent marketing, will breed confidence. I have a retail furniture client who has been with me over forty years. When she first began to market her product, she spent a fortune advertising on television. Could she afford it? Of course not. But she believed that television was her key to success. With the number of dollars she had to invest, television was her key to doom because she could afford to run only two commercials per week, even though they were on the highest-rated show at the time. Ratings are virtually meaningless with only two spots a week. It doesn’t take a guerrilla to know that one can’t expect TV to produce profits with so few commercials. Today my client runs lots of commercials on local cable TV, investing only a tiny portion of her marketing budget and enjoying exceptionally gratifying profits as a result. We’ll discuss TV in greater detail later, but for now, suffice it to say that unless you can use a medium effectively, you shouldn’t use it at all.

My client was able to salvage her business from her disastrous TV experience. When she met with me, we talked about commitment, investment, and consistency. We talked about the other guerrilla secrets as well. Since that day she has run a tiny ad in the newspaper every Sunday and her sales have continued to rise. She dramatically increased her sales without increasing her marketing investment as a percentage of her gross revenue. It happened over a period of several years. Her store has quadrupled in size, and her profits have followed suit. As I mentioned, she’s also back on television— running ten commercials per day, two weeks out of every four. The key to her glittering success was consistent advertising. She calls her Sunday newspaper ad, now not so tiny, her “meal ticket.” And she’s right. She tells me that almost everyone who comes into her store says they’ve seen the original ad. You’d find that hard to believe if you saw the small size of the original ad, but you’d find it easy to believe if you knew that she’s been running that and similar ads in the same newspaper in the same section on the same day for years. People are familiar with her operation. They’re confident in her offerings. And they buy from her.

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About the Author Jesse Byron

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