Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

Nearly a half-century has passed since David Ogilvie wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963).  It was a best-seller.  It transformed him from successful agency owner (Ogilvie & Mather) into a larger-than-life character in advertising and marketing. His no-nonsense observations about successful selling – how and why products of all kinds are bought and sold – are every bit as instructional today as they were then, if not more. Small wonder why his book is considered a classic in its genre and has sold millions of copies.   

It’s an understatement to say that it was a simpler world when David Ogilvie was selling better flavors, whiter washes, and better complexions.  But despite the overwhelming proliferation of products and media today that was inconceivable in the 1960s, there is one thing that’s stayed the same: the importance of promising a benefit when selling any kind of product.  The most successful marketers, historically – P&G and General Electric come readily to mind, for example -- have always understood and profited by this principle.  It’s built into their DNA.  It’s fundamental not just to their marketing function, but the full span of their business operations.  Indeed, in our own experience at Turner DeVaughn Network, the promise of a product’s benefit is central to the basic operations of successful clients as varied as Adobe, Clorox and WD-40.     

In the heyday of “Madison Avenue”, when the big ad agencies didn’t just write jingles for cars but also designed the showrooms, when they didn’t just shoot commercials for airlines but created the fashions of the flight attendants (known then as stewardesses and hostesses), there were fewer car companies and TV networks.  And manufacturing wasn’t “off-shored” which meant that it was more expensive and harder for smaller outfits to market their wares and establish distribution.  One consequence of a simpler, “rounder” world was that there was less competition.  Competitiveness was no less intense, but the choices of brands and products were far fewer compared to today by orders of magnitude.

Fast forward to the global marketplace of Thomas Friedman’s "flat world" and one of its many consequences: the proliferation of small and medium-sized marketers (read: advertisers) fighting it out for a smaller percentage of market share and too often ignorant of – or oblivious to – the all-important notion of promising a benefit, or what is also known as a value proposition.  The smaller players compete on innovation, features, price or distribution (availability) with more or less success.  No question that being nimble and fleet-footed, as youngish enterprises and entrepreneurs typically are, puts you in position to out-innovate the bigger guys, as tons of business books and countless articles can attest.   The larger companies – those big guys – may not always be able to out-innovate the start-ups, of course.  But the ones who genuinely and thoroughly understand what it is their customers place the most value on, the ones with the best customer instincts and market insights, will more often be able to pinpoint and then promise the right benefit.  This gives them a leg up on delivering the right innovations more consistently – the ones their customers will find most irresistible.  The ones for which they will pay the most to have.  The so-called “innovations” brought to market by the other guys, if they’re not based on genuine benefits and a relevant value proposition, will wither and die just about every time no matter how gaudy the PR fanfare.  Or how low the price.