A blogger recently wrote an article on receiving an envelope marked “IMPORTANT INFORMATION INSIDE”, and her disappointment and mild anger when she found out it was simply an ad for Internet Service.
You can check out her article here :
Are TW’s people under the mistaken impression that people don’t already know their local ISP choices? Out of a pool of what, 3 or 4? Awareness is great for a new product, but not as important for a well known small pool vendor where most people who know what an ISP is know their choices, and the rest of them listen to some technical friend.
I’ve been saying this a lot lately, if your product is good people who are aware of it will buy it. If it sucks, then no amount of convincing will bring them to your side.
Once again, it comes down to simple morality. Are you going to be good or bad? Are you going to make the world a better place, or sacrifice anything in the name of profit?
Companies need to decide whether or not they’re going to be a positive source of information and contribute to the world with the best product they can give, or if they’re going to try to trick people into buying things they don’t want, don’t need, and don’t like.
If you read time warner’s reviews online, you’d know that much like comcast they’re fairly hated by their customer base. For this reason, they’ve decided that its easier to take advantage of people and mislead their potential clients, as opposed to spending that time and energy building a better service, or offering what people actually want in a compelling way. I’d be willing to bet that they get more eyeballs this way, but if they were to offer 50% off your bill on the envelope, they’d get more INTERESTED customers. This is another case of awareness marketing gone bad. More eyeballs is way less important than more interested eyeballs. I’d pay 10x more for a lead that I was sure was looking to buy compared to some random person I had to trick to even look at my offer.
This kind of marketing does work, and that is sad, but given the funky data collection I’ve seen so far in the ad biz, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a more rigorous scientific data collection would result in more accurate results. The subliminal stuff is overrated, ESPECIALLY now that we live in a world where more and more consumers are leveraging the Internet to become super informed buyers. Endless repetition, brand recognition, and all those other “tricks” are becoming less effective and this has been supported by many recent studies focusing on young people who simply don’t trust advertising at all unless its dead honest or from a trusted source. This kind of deception does more damage than its worth in the long run.