Advertising - persuader or promoter?

Take the perennial debate on bottled water for example. Logically, it doesn’t make sense for someone to spend R25 on a bottle of imported water in a restaurant when the tap water they can get for free is just as safe and just as healthy. But, in spite of independent tests showing that tap water is, in a lot of cases, healthier than bottled water, consumers keep spending money completely unnecessarily.

Creates perception

The only possible answer to this is smart marketing and a deluge of advertising that creates the perception that bottled water is somehow a lot safer than the stuff that comes out of taps. Even now that some water bottlers have admitted getting their raw material straight out of the tap anyway.

I would guess that the reason a lot of people keep drinking bottled water is exactly the same as that which motivates a lot of people to buy expensive Mercs and BMWs in spite of the fact that they know without any shadow of doubt that in terms of getting from A to B, a top-of-the-range Toyota or Nissan at half the price, will get them there just as efficiently and probably just as comfortably.

Then, on the other the hand, we have seen tobacco advertising banned all over the world without any proportionate drop in cigarette sales. Oh indeed, smoking is a heck of a lot more passe in South Africa, for example, than it was a decade ago, but there is no question that has almost everything to do with smoking being banned in public places which has given non-smokers a wonderful opportunity to exert some peer pressure on smokers.

Scapegoat

It seems to me that advertising is just a convenient scapegoat. As the most visible component of marketing, it is the most targeted, with legislators simply assuming that advertising on its own is all powerful. Which it isn’t. All the other bits and pieces of the marketing mix have to play a role to support advertising which cannot do the job all on its own.

According to a report released by the Federal Trade Commission in the US, the six major tobacco companies are spending more on marketing than ever before in spite of spending far less on actual advertising.

Admittedly, they are faced with falling sales but this is happening both in countries where ads have been banned and in countries where tobacco advertising is still legal.

What the companies are doing to keep consumers buying cigarettes is using those ad budgets for value-added marketing at retail level – discounts, giveaways, events, retailer incentives and so forth.

Little decline

So, when one looks at the fact that those six manufacturers are actually spending in the region of half a billion rand a year on ads persuading people NOT to start smoking and have also stopped paying movie producers to include cigarette smoking in films, the number of consumers who start smoking has not declined anywhere near proportionately.

There are literally hundreds of case histories showing that advertising is enormously powerful but there are just as many showing that all advertising can do is promote and not “sell” anything.

A casual glance at the differences within those case histories does not throw up any immediately visible reasons.

Promotes not persuades

My guess, however, is that if one mined deep enough into those differences, two main differentiators might well appear. One is that advertising works well when it is not designed to overtly persuade but just to promote and then only when it is used in conjunction with all the other elements of the marketing mix.

The second is when it elicits some sort of emotional response from the consumer. Maybe this is why people aren’t cajoled into smoking by tobacco ads because both the perception and reality is that it is bad for you. And equally, it is also the reason why people keep buying bottled water in spite of the cost – because the perception is that it is healthier.