National Clothesline

Here are some of John Hallward’s ideas from his new book, “Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing” and how I see that they can work for drycleaners.

Businesses around the world spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on advertising. Yet fewer than half of their campaigns succeed. That’s a lot of money wasted.

One of the reasons many advertisers fail is they forget their target markets are humans! Our human traits, features, and emotions factor into whether advertising has an impact on us.

It’s pretty simple: successful marketing appeals to the way our DNA and brains work. Advertisers need to understand more about how people process ads and make brand choices — specifically, using their emotions, attitudes, values, and memories.

These criteria are what the author calls the “gimmes” — the self-centered demands we all have for emotional fulfillment of our different moods. As much as selfishness is viewed as a negative personality trait, it is innate and genetic.

This isn’t what our parents would have had us believe when they said, “Gimme, gimme, never gets…”, but it’s the truth. Wanting things is genetically natural; humans are wired to be self-centered to ensure survival.

So, above all, marketing efforts should offer emotional pay-offs that satisfy consumers’ moods, desires, insecurities, and their status in the world. To be more effective, marketers should focus on consumers’ “gimmes,” and less on “my store.”

For drycleaners, looking to advertise their business, one strategy would be to discuss its benefits — its expertise in cleaning many varied garments, a long history, free pick-up and delivery, or a low price point.

The problem is that consumers aren’t looking for drycleaning, per se. They are looking to have their clothes cleaned and renewed. And their choice of cleaners will be influenced by more than the above.

Consumers who use drycleaning want emotional pay-offs. They want to avoid the disappointment of not looking their very best. They want to experience pride and feel confident. They want their spouse to admire them (proving their worth). They want to show off their nice appearance to their coworkers and neighbors.

Most consumers want to experience many of these pay-offs. And since many drycleaners clean clothes equally well, a successful brand will go beyond advertising its qualities to assuring emotional pay-offs. Golomb Group members who do this tend to achieve greater brand commitment and brand equity, command higher prices and are more profitable.

We often see mature, established drycleaners struggle to maintain their success. Their marketing needs to keep evolving and changing the consumer experience to avoid desensitization.

Advertisers really have two main jobs, and they need to know which is most required for their brand: (1) get the right brand associations into consumers’ minds then (2) trigger, or activate, these at the right time.

An example of excellent triggering is the old “It’s Miller Time” campaign, which leveraged the concept that after a hard day’s work, it was time to relax and enjoy a Miller beer. The campaign focused on the transition from work to relaxation, a beer consumption time.

The campaign worked to trigger the brand at the transition period from work to relaxation, and associated the brand with the emotional pay-offs (for the human “gimmes”).

“It’s Miller Time” is a beautiful, easy-to-remember slogan that activates positive feelings of quitting time, triggers the beer consumption urge, and ties in the brand name — all in one easy-to-remember memory unit.

This is not about product features, how the beer is made, purity, or taste. These elements are already known to consumers. “Miller Time” triggers the brand and pay-offs at the relevant time association. Brilliant!

• Be fresh and original. For something to stand out and register in our long-term memories, it needs to be somewhat irregular. The Aflac duck is one example of a brand that has done a great job of leveraging uniqueness and irregularity to engage the brain.

• Simple is good. Our brains are bombarded with stimuli. Advertising messages given in units, slogans, and stories win out over fragmented alternatives. Simple, emotional memory units get into our long-term memories better.

• Enhance your brand with marketing properties. Brands that use devices like icons (the inscrutable Starbucks logo), spokespeople (Tiger Woods for Nike), cartoon characters (Tony the Tiger and the white Michelin man), and other extra properties often get great results.

Consider that wines that use names and drawings of animals on their labels sell 17 percent better than wines that don’t. Each has added a personality and something more to evaluate than the basic functionality of the product.

• Enhance your brand with the human senses. Another way to enhance brands is to enrich them through the five human senses.

For example: Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder offers a unique distinctive smell. (For a while, I sprayed a “country fresh” air spray over the finished orders on the line, just before packaging, to give them an extra air of freshness.)

Perrier water comes in a distinctive green pear-shaped bottle. (Unique packaging will set your work apart from other cleaners.)

And Pepto-Bismol is a shocking pink. (A consistent color scheme should be carried through in your advertising, in your packaging, in your call office, uniforms, etc.)

In these examples, your brand is creating and leveraging elements beyond what is necessary for product performance. These extra senses offer more for consumers to latch on to, and allow the brand to be stored in more parts of the brain, in the different centers for touch, taste, vision, sound, and smell.

When you get a better understanding of the brain’s wiring, the role of emotions, how the senses work, how memories are created, and how we make decisions, it’s easier to grasp what marketing must do to resonate in the consumer’s mind.