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…
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