All Marketing is One-to-One

Each message a company sends is building a relationship with someone: good, bad or indifferent.

By Andrea Fitting
President and CEO, Fitting Group

Let's start with the premise that you are business people, but you are also consumers living in America. You are bombarded daily by thousands of messages trying to persuade you to act or think differently. Given this, don't you find yourself paying much more attention to ads that "speak" to you? I do. And now, as if it weren't enough that ads "speak" to us visually, they're promising to engage our other senses as well. Of course they do this by giving us a directive such as "press here." Companies such as Proctor & Gamble and Virgin Records are testing bus stop posters in London that emit new scents of shampoo and new tunes that are being released.

But back to magazine and newspaper ads - I like ads that give me a directive. That way, I can read the instruction, quickly decide if I'm interested and either read the rest or move on. With all of the clutter in the marketplace, it seems almost like a courtesy to get to the point. When I read things like "Get the lowest price..." or "Come join the fun" or "Make your next event unique," I appreciate the efficiency with which the communication states the benefit to me. I feel like the company has respected my time. Whether I need their products now or not, they've left a good impression. I will remember them...for a while, anyway. And if they are consistent about putting a good message in front of me, I'm more likely to be thinking of them when the right time comes. Ads that make me work hard to get the point just make me mad. And ads that never get to the point make me even madder.

So what's my point? When planning an ad or marketing message imagine you're face-to-face and this is your opening line. Write the headline as if your prospect will walk out of the room if what you say is boring, stupid or obtuse. If you're not a writer, hire one. If you're not a designer, hire one of those too. But by all means, recognize that you're selling to one person at a time, even if the circulation of the publication it will eventually appear in is vast.

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