Related Posts
- How To Make Chicken Stew: First, Steal A Chicken…
- Burger King’s New Idea: Marketing To Women
- Research Tools You Can Use: Creating A Board of Customer Evangelists
More From This Category
- Esurance’s New Ad Campaign: Pushing All The Right Buttons
- The One Very Important Thing You Can Learn From “Back to School” Marketers
- Friday Fun: Alan King Tells Us Why Marketing To Women Is Important
- When Free Isn’t Free Enough
I was going through my video archives this morning and came across this short piece, presented by Dave Young at the Wyoming Governor’s Conference on Tourism conference last January.
Using an “action speaks louder than words” example, Dave illustrates the importance of having one – and ONLY one – idea per ad.
It’s highly tempting to want to stuff everything you possibly can about your business into the space available. But what has more impact – one, laser-tipped idea that the customer can grasp, or a dozen ideas sprayed across the room like buckshot?
One idea. One small part of your message. Build your house of marketing brick by brick.
Michele Miller is a writer, speaker, and consultant on ways to capture the heart of the female customer. The co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth, she consults with businesses of all sizes across North America
There is an apocryphal story about a very successful copywriter who was called into a big-time corporate meeting to discuss the 13 or so “very important” points that an upcoming mailing / sales letter had to convey. Well this copywriter walks into the conference room, doesn’t say a word, and pulls out a board/bed of nails and a frying pan. He then puts the board down on the table and smashes the frying pan into the nails right in front of the astonished executives. Afterwords he displays the dimpled back of the frying pan to the room and replaces the bed of nails board with a board that only has a single spike sticking up from it. He then smashes the pan on the spike, causing the spike to punch clean through the bottom of the pan. After pulling the pan from the spike, the copywriter than passes the pan w/ hole around for every executive to see and, after a brief pause says, “Now, how many points did you want this mailer to have?”
- Jeff
Ha, love it! Great story, and right to the point (no pun intended!).
Jeff, do you have a source for that story? It is fabulous (if only I could figure out how to take boards with nails on an airplane).