Problem Solution

Pretty much every product or service you ever have to advertise in your career will be a product or service that seeks to solve a particular problem. Indeed at the heart of many ads is a demonstration of how the particular product or service solves the relevant problem – or more importantly how the particular product or service solves the relevant problem in a better/faster/ smoother/more affordable way than the competition.

When one is creating ads like this, one can generally chose to focus on one of two things: the problem or the solution. The Kenya Power ad here focuses on the problem – freezing water. The alternative would be to focus on the solution – a steaming hot shower.

So the question is this: which of these two approaches is more effective? Is it better to:

a) Remind people, albeit in this case in quite a funny way, that ‘this is the problem that you have in your life and we’re the ones who can solve it, just call 0722…’, or,

b) Show people how their life could be if they didn’t have the problem, and then tell them how your product or service is the one to take them to said ‘promised land’.

What most ads try to do is straddle the middle-ground between these two approaches. A classic example of this is the ‘before & after’ weight-loss ad: “here is me when I was really fat” and “here’s me after I had my tummy cut out by a surgeon in Hyderabad!”

As always, advertising is all about effectiveness, and I guess that the ‘before & after’ approach wouldn’t still be in use after all these years if it wasn’t effective, but I would like to stress at this point that there is a difference between short-term and long-term effectiveness.

Short-term effectiveness is measured directly in terms of sales: you ran the ad and sold 50 tummy operations in the space of a week. Long-term effectiveness is measured in terms of market share, customer loyalty (though I guess you can’t have more than one tummy removal procedure) and the premium that you can charge for what you do/sell. In other words, long-term effectiveness is measured in terms of the strength of the brand.

The sales-returns vs. brand-strength dilemma gives marketing departments sleepless nights. Your bonus is based upon the former but your legacy, and the long-term survival of your company, is based upon the latter.

There is a reason that the big boys refer to themselves as ‘brand custodians’: a brand is something that comes into your ‘custody’ by virtue of your position. Your job must be to hand it over to the next custodian in better shape than you found it.

I know that this is something that I have talked about before, but it really is at the heart of everything. Advertising is an on-going process of brand building. It is not the only tool available to brand builders, but it is one of the most powerful.

A study conducted into insurance advertising demonstrated that those campaigns that focused excessively on the problems – fire, sickness, death, robbery – produced a mid to long term fall in sales by the brands in question. We know why we need insurance, but we sure as hell don’t want to be reminded of the harsher facts of life. Given that brands are built on the basis of associations, it is a very bad idea to construct too many bad associations with your brand… the consequences will inevitably be negative…

That is why there is humor in these Kenya Power ads. The creators are ‘softening’ the negative associations by giving you something to smile about. If these ads genuinely depicted the reality of freezing showers they would probably be a bit too close to the bone to make us feel good about Kenya Power.

I’m a great believer in the power of the positive, which is probably the result of watching too much Star Wars as a child, but that said surely in a world full of problems it pays to be the brand with the solutions…