False marketing is one of the main reasons why some advertising campaigns don’t work. It is not hard to avoid – but huge numbers of firms suffer from it, simply because they either don’t know about it, or they can’t believe it applies to them.
In essence “false marketing” is a term that refers to the problem of letting an assumption slip into your marketing programme at a basic level.
It results in a company producing adverts which look as if they really ought to work, but which bring in very few replies, all because the assumption made by the company is not shared by the teachers who receive the advert.
To explain how false marketing affects a campaign, I will give some examples. However I hope you will understand that in some cases I simply can’t give full details since the company is or was a client of Hamilton House – and we do respect confidentiality at all times.
1: The Sales Assumption
In one case a company that sold air conditioning equipment to schools had the view that most schools did not have air conditioning, but that when they were approached they tended to see the benefits.
Our adverts based on that view failed, and our suggestion that we needed some research to check teacher attitudes was rejected – the company’s view was that they had salesmen on the ground and they were reporting back, so the company knew exactly what was going on in schools.
However after the contract ended we did undertake some research, just to find out why we had failed to get the sales the company quite reasonably expected. What we found was that the assumptions made about schools and air condition were utterly wrong. In fact 50% of schools have some air conditioning, and those that don’t tend not to have because they believe air conditioning to be a bad thing. Those that do, don’t need to be sold on the idea of air conditioning – they need to be shown why company x is better than company y.
2: The level of decision making
In addition to the normal classroom subjects some secondary schools teach “study skills” – or “learning how to learn”. But who takes the decision on how to do teach this, when is it taught, and what’s in the programme?
If you were taught study skills in the run up to your GCSE or A Level exams you might assume that is how it works in all schools. If you were not taught it at all, you might assume that’s what happens everywhere. Likewise if you were taught how to study by a couple of individual teachers in relation to their subject, again you might assume that is the norm.
All these experiences will influence the assumption you would make over how and where a decision about study skills teaching is taken. Or whether there is any decision made at all. And then you would use that information to build your advertising assumptions.
Thus if you were to take the view that all study skills teaching is handled individually, and conduct your advertising that way, you might get poor results if in fact in many schools study skills teaching is a matter of school policy, decided at a senior management level.
The only way around this would be to do some simple research. As always the cost would be very little, but it could turn your whole campaign around.
3: The belief that one is being original
This is a major problem; for we all like to think that our product or service is original. Indeed such a view can be boosted at a trade show when teachers come along and say, “Oh I’ve been looking for this for ages…”
We had a situation in which we wrote adverts based on the fact that a literacy product was unique. When the ads failed we wrote to teachers and said “if you were faced with 8 year old boys who refused to take an interest in books, and so were way behind in their literacy level, although clearly not dyslexic, what software would you use?”
The answer should have been “none” and “if you find any, let me know”. But respondents came back with the names of several packages, and often spoke enthusiastically about them. That told us not only why the adverts were failing, but also gave us a lot of information about the competition.
4. The technical word
Words mean different things in different contexts, as we all know, and sometimes we can all get so close to our own work we forget our customers might use a word in a different way.
We’ve recently found this with one common word in every day use by the teachers we were trying to reach. Once we suspected where the problem lay we emailed some teachers and asked them how they defined that single word.
The replies showed us the problem – but also gave us the answer, since many teachers opened their response with saying, “this is a really interesting point,” or “we have just spent the last hour debating this in the staff room…”
The problem throughout is that we can all be so close to our product that we don’t see these and the many other difficulties that can lead to false marketing.
The research in all these cases cost very little, and involved sending out either questionnaires or emails to teachers. Some of our clients just ask us what questions we would ask – and we tell them. Some ask us to put together the research programme, which we do. Some use our Velocity programme
Indeed this type of research is a big reason why Velocity exists. Because part of our job is to ask this sort of question and see what lies behind the advertising in terms of language, assumptions, attitude, buying patterns and so on.
If you would like to know more about Velocity there’s details on www.velocity.ac – or call 01536 399 000. We can talk about any aspect of false marketing – or come to that any other aspect of marketing you like.
Tony Attwood
Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB. Phone 01536 399 000.
