Fundamentals Forgotten? 200-Year-Old Trick Guaranteed To Boost Sales

Breakthroughs in Psychology and the mass media through the 19th and 20th Century gave birth the modern advertising.

But how does that influence our marketing decisions today?

And how can those fundamentals assist in your business growth?

Today things seem easy.

Everything is digital.

We are told to simply create a website and social media presence, and people will flock to us.

The fundamentals?

They can go out of the window.

We are in a new era now, where the old knowledge doesn't matter anymore.

We're in this new world.

The digital age.

For centuries, we were clueless about marketing. We knew absolutely nothing!

And then, the internet.

What would we do without it?

Around the year 1995, companies first started to understanding advertising.

Small businesses can now create websites, run a simple ad campaign... and their job is done.

Kick back and relax.

Enjoy the show.

Reap the rewards of your online brand.

For us millennials, we believe that the internet came... and life begun.

Little do we know, people dismissed the internet for a decade.

Businesses (and most people) stuck to their conventional means.

People (as always) were reluctant to make the change.

The 'believers' had moved to this new world, developing platforms across the web.

All in the hopes of capturing the attention of some venture capitalist.

There was a time that the internet was an innovative place.

There were hundreds of up-and-coming websites, online stores, search engines and social media platforms.

Before Google or Facebook bought all their competition and shut down any innovation.

The problem?

Every website was deemed to the next "Broadcast.com", and have Yahoo throw them a couple of billion dollars.

During this time... Wall Street went crazy.

By 1999, investors in Silicon Valley were dumping money into small, never-to-be-successful internet businesses.

By the millions.

Stocks rose day after day.

Hedge funds and investors took bets on college graduates in their dorm rooms.

User base, subscriptions and website traffic were used to justify the rising stock price.

This was dubbed the 'dot com bubble.'

And all to an end when investors realised they were funding 17-year old College dropouts to sit and learn code.

Thousands of speculators lost their money.

Hundreds of online companies went out of business.

It was a mess.

Fast-forward ten years.

Netflix.

Twitter.

Uber.

Never made a profit.

Their stock price?

Based on subscription metrics.

Remind you of something?

Be honest.

Do you judge your marketing campaigns on likes and comments?

Does your 'engagement metric' connect with your net worth?

Unluckily for most of us, we cannot run our companies on billion dollar losses year-after-year.

We have to make money with our advertising.

That means we need other metrics to judge our success on.

We need to make sure we have...

Dare we say it?

A return on investment.

Let's take a step back.

What happens when you don't have a digital platform?

Forget the LinkedIn tags.

Forget the blog posts.

Forget your website.

To many of our surprise, the world existed before the internet.

The internet is simply a tool of communication.

And if you are working in advertising?

It is a tool that enables you to reach (and persuade) your customers.

The fundamentals remain the same.

Advertising has now been part of our culture for over a century.

It's a fairly new 'science', but it is well developed.

Direct marketing goes back to the late 1700s.

Forget the hype of the internet, only for a second.

Let's take a little trip down memory lane.

To the greats that came before us.

DIRECT MARKETING

Direct marketing is a term that gets thrown around a lot. What is it?

It all starts with a young British entrepreneur, as all good things do.

The industrial revolution gave birth to a new kind of entrepreneur.

Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, fascinated with selling his goods to the emergent middle class.

The grandfather of Charles Darwin, he is credited for:

door-to-door salesman, free delivery and buy one get one free (to name a few).

He was also the first to produce the illustrated catalogue.

Contributing to the birth of direct marketing, Josiah used these techniques to became one of the wealthiest men in the 18th century.

But wait!

Where was his Facebook page?

What about Google Ads campaign?

How did he reach his customer, without a personal LinkedIn video?

Josiah didn't need Silicon Valley.

Josiah understood the fundamentals.

Josiah knew the truth.

Business is about providing (perceived) value to people's lives.

The key word is 'perceived'.

You could have the best product in the world.

If you can't sell it, who cares?

Advertising is about perceived value.

The consumer must see the value in your product before purchasing.

Advertising as a Science

The late 1800s and 1900s had given birth to a new discipline.

Psychology.

The most notable was a young Sigmund Freud, who begun publishing his works on the mind in the late 1800s.

As we got a deeper understanding of human behaviours (and motivators), this gave advertisers a powerful weapon.

With the assistance of the socio-economic growth of the Western world and emergence of the middle class.

Direct mail had been used for hundreds of years.

Even before Josiah would send people door-to-door selling his products, the printing press (1400s) gave people the ability to target people directly at their homes.

But this took a major step in the late 1800s, Montgomery Ward and Sears both taking it to new heights with successful direct mail campaigns that built the foundations of businesses that lasted much longer than their lives.

Perfecting the art of crafting words to sell product to the masses became the goal of advertising greats.

Tracking each penny spent was not a revelation of the internet and Google AdWords.

Companies would do what is known as 'A/B testing' early in the 1900s, producing separate advertisements for the same product, and analysing the performance of each advertisement.

Direct mail marketing gave businesses that ability to perform their advertising as an exact science.

Copywriters became prominent during the early 1900s.

Advertisement agencies worldwide continued experimenting on the masses.

We continued developing on our friend's Josiah's marvellous discoveries from the late 1700s.

We began to use the understanding of human behaviour to encourage people to buy products.

Reiterating and testing advertisements until they were perfect.

Every word made to count.

When they were sure they had a hit?

Companies would run that advertisement for years, sometimes decades.

Copywriters gave us these practical foundations.

The ability to sell products or services through the written word.

Everything we know today can be attributed to the discoveries of the last couple of hundred years.

Good copy sells.

Through the mass production of advertisements, we understood the fundamentals.

An headline that appeals to them, selects an audience and demands urgent attention.

Swift introduction of the problem, a focus on the customers needs, and a reason to purchase.

Then the guarantee that when they do go ahead and purchase, they'll be satisfied.

All to be delivered in an advertisement.

Over the decades, advertisement agencies shared this knowledge.

Claude C. Hopkins gave us the foundations with his breakthrough work in Scientific Advertising (1921).

Individuals may come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a part of the organization's equipment, and a guide to all who follow. Thus, in the course of decades, such agencies become storehouses of advertising experiences, proved principles, and methods.

The larger agencies also come into intimate contact with experts in every department of business. Their clients are usually dominating concerns. So they see the results of countless methods and polices. They become a clearing house for every thing pertaining to merchandising. Nearly every selling question which arises in business is accurately answered by many experiences.

Under these conditions, where they long exist, advertising and merchandising become exact sciences. Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.

We learn the principles and prove them by repeated tests. This is done through keyed advertising, by traced returns, largely by the use of coupons. We compare one way with many others, backward and forward, and record the results. When one method invariably proves best, that method becomes a fixed principle.

Mail order advertising is traced down to the fraction of a penny. The cost per reply and cost per dollar of sale show up with utter exactness.

One ad is compared with another, one method with another. Headlines, settings, sizes, arguments and pictures are compared. To reduce the cost of results even one per cent means much in some mail order advertising. So no guesswork is permitted. One must know what is best. Thus mail order advertising first established many of our basic laws.

-Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (1921)

Loyalty programmes, subscription cards, free-dial numbers were another huge step in the 60s, as we developed more ways to 'close the sale' via the written word.

Many famous copywriters (David Ogilvy, Robert Bly) shared with us their findings.

Tests on millions of people, across dozens of industries.

Newspapers.

Brochures.

Radio.

TV.

The internet.

The tests are conclusive.

They all reach the same result.

Direct marketing works.

As a science.

Are you reaching out to someone to sell a product?

That is the practice of direct marketing.

"the business of selling products or services directly to the public, e.g. by mail order or telephone selling, rather than through retailers."

In other words:

"The only other way to do business, other than opening a brick-and-mortar store and simply waiting for people to arrive."

Direct marketing?

It is everything you do to reach your customer.

BRANDING

Meanwhile, we had another discussion happening...

Today?

We all hear the same thing.

"People buy from people."

Which is true.

We do buy from people.

But it's also not true.

We buy from brands.

But is Apple a person?

Is Amazon a person?

Is Nike a person?

Do we really want to buy from people?

Think about some of the brands these words evoke:

• Sports
• Burgers
• Search Engines
• Crisps
• Smart Phones

Did you think of any brands connected to those words?

Some more stronger than others?

Nike (Sports), Burgers (McDonalds), Search Engine (Google), Crisps (Walkers), Smart Phones (Apple).

How did these companies become synonymous with lifestyles and words?

During the 20th century, advertising creatives got to work.

Working day and night.

To get customers attached to brands.

Branding, logo design, typography and many other disciplines have since become a larger part of our culture.

The only purpose?

To be the first thing to come to mind when you think of their industry.

Think 'Xerox', 'Rizlas', 'Velcro', 'Jet Ski', 'Bubble Wrap'.

Those are all brands that became synonymous with the product.

When you search for something online, what do you ask someone?

"Google it."

Google was the first brand to become an official word in the Oxford Dictionary.

That's how much they dominate the search engine markets.

Large organisations are fighting for the first position and to dominate market share.

The market share?

It is in the minds of the masses.

"How do you connect your brand to a customer?"

"How do I become synonymous with the name of the product?"

Advertisers attempting to connect your perception of their brand to words.

And companies spending billions of pounds trying to "own" specific words in your mind.

As small businesses?

Your "branding" efforts might include a logo and a USP.

And our advertising efforts are branding-driven;

Think:

• Community Sponsorships
• Billboard Ads
• Display Ads

Branding is connecting your company with a brand.

The brand, a message that resonates with your audience.

To the large multinational businesses?

They fight to maintain market share and position themselves as "lifestyle brands."

Brands today fight for space online, telling compelling stories across many formats.

Video, articles, social media engagement, television, radio, mass media.

Companies build communities that become the foundations of their business.

Valued at $17 billion in 2017, only 9 years after launching, their asset is the audience.

Airbnb own nothing besides having a community of people, who want to use their platform.

Employing over 6000 people, through the power of a brand.

The company owns no real estate.

They do no event planning.

They simply act as a commissioner when people book their stay (in people's homes) through their platform.

All built on the power of the internet.

That wasn't possible for Josiah, obviously.

But the idea of 'branding' isn't new.

Emergence of the Brand

The modern utility of the 'brand' is remarkable.

But where did this all start?

Historians have discovered items were banded to show the origin of goods.

Packaging and branding were used to differentiate the origin and quality of goods as far back as the 1400s.

Signs above stores in ancient marketplaces show that efforts were made to differentiate our goods and services.

Cattle were branded by farmers and craftsmen would imprint their goods with symbols that indicated the origin (or ownership) as far back as 2000 BC.

The emergence of Cola-Cola, Ford and Lego?

That cannot be explained with farmers, and cattle.

Back to the birth of the modern-day consumer.

By the late 1800s, the effects of the industrial revolution had begun to take effect across the world.

After more work became automated and human labour freed, people had time to think.

More and more people were escaping poverty, which left room for companies to sell us things that determine our worth in society.

Markets became more saturated with the same product, by separate businesses.

For the first time, businesses had to separate themselves from the competition.

Trademarks were first developed in the 1800s and laws passed across France, UK and the USA.

In the UK, the first 'logo' to be registered was the triangle of 'Bass Brewery' in 1875.

But it took more than a trademark or logo to develop a brand.

We started to think about the needs of our audience.

Companies began to target audiences at different socio-economic status, which determined their strategy.

Their message, their position in the market, their brand image.

All cultivated to connect with their target audience.

In the early 1900s, advertising giant J. Walter Thompson started the world's first creative department in an advertising agency.

He began to utilise the 'brand' in new ways, to position businesses in accordance with their customer's preferences.

We began to wonder what the audience wants.

We began to ask some of the right questions.

We began to recognise the recognise the importance of understanding our customers.

• Who are our audience?
• What is our customer problem?
• How do we solve their problem?
• How do we effectively connect with our customers?
• What do they want to see?
• Where are they?
• How do we reach them?

Think about a simple business plan today. Some of the first questions may be:

• What is our customer promise?
• What do we stand for?
• What is our message?
• What separates our business from others?

The 'brand' became more than a tool to differentiate between the origin of the goods.

The brand became who the company was.

And now? Brands battle online to 'engage with their target audience.'

They position themselves on key issues, to reflect the views of their target audience.

We applaud companies who act on these issues, corporate responsibility statements dictate how businesses are "environmentally and socially friendly."

Brands now use this positioning to enter the marketplace and dominate whole industries.

As small businesses, we might take some lessons from this.

The first step is considering your customers and their needs.

Beyond that, it's cultivating a brand tone and message that appeals to your audience.

In today's society?

There's nothing better than the truth and authenticity.

You can no longer "over-communicate."

We are in a hyperactive world, that is dominated by content.

Where do the branding and direct marketing meet?

Direct marketing is reaching out to your audience and persuading them to purchase.

Branding is about the awareness of your product, connecting your business to a message.

Marketing is finding an audience and selling them a service or product that solves their problem.

Branding is connecting that service or product to a brand.

To a message.

A message that reflect your customer and their values.

The simple fact is, Josiah didn't need the internet.

He didn't rely on a brand.

He fought the world within the social constructs of the time.

He innovated.

He sent people, selling door-to-door.

He mailed brochures with illustrations for the first time.

He used the means available to him, to reach people... and sell them products.

Cola Cola didn't need the internet.

McDonalds, Kellogg's?

They may have needed to switch to the internet to adapt to a new channel of marketing.

But they understood a core truth.

The internet is simply a medium.

Your audience were not always online.

The core science?

It remains the same.

Though it is neglected.

Stop looking for the next piece of advice that gives you the "new best way to reach your audience."

Better yet?

Master the fundamentals.

Go back to the basics.

Think about how all this started.

And the century of advertising practice that have given us this marvellous science.

Advertising.

Branding and marketing are two separate issues.

But they must work together.

At the core?

It's about connecting with your audience.

And persuading them to purchase your product or service.

Let's not get it twisted.

Advertising is about sales.

But in 2020.

It's a little different that it was in 1700.

But wait...

We said a little different.

The fundamentals?

They remain the same.

Buy one get one free?

It still works.

Remember Josiah?

The guy who was credited as being the pioneer of modern advertising.

He also came up with one other tactic, other than the ones we listed above.

Possibly one of our most effective tool in advertising that effectively closes sales.

No matter if it's direct marketing or more in-bound marketing, through our branding efforts.

The audience appreciate the one extra trick, that Josiah had up his sleeve.

For those who made it to this point of the article, we have a reward.

You'll recognise it everywhere once you realise...

Money Back Guarantees

Can you incorporate the money-back guarantee into your sales pitch?

We all know about our consumer rights, with the 14-day cooling off period on products and services.

But money-back guarantees go back to the 1700s.

It's a marketing tool.

"We offer 30-day guarantees on our product/service. Try us today and if you are aren't 100% satisfied with our product, we'll refund your order!"

For those looking to make a change in their approach to marketing...

Think about the money-back guarantee.

If possible, offering a money-back guarantee may be the most effective tool in your arsenal.

It removes the barrier to entry.

It improves customer trust.

It tells your customer that you believe in your product or service so much, you'd put your money where you mouth is.

And that is a powerful tool.

Prospect27 as a small digital agency, who manage over 80 customer websites.

All delivered at no upfront cost.

But even their initial ￡30.00 deposit were covered under our 30-day money back guarantee.

This ensures they are happy moving forward with a pay-monthly website after our first month of business.

How can you use a money-back guarantee in your product, and let your customer know.

That you believe in your product.