Salesmanship vs Showmanship

Great advertising doesn't sell but it does make people buy.

When I was 18 I lived in London for a year. My first job interview was with what?they called a “marketing company”. It was not a marketing company. It?was a door-to-door sales company that sold cheap crap to unsuspecting customers. It?was the London version of what we in Joburg can buy at traffic lights. Part of my “interview” (in fact, it was all of my interview) was to shadow one of their senior salesmen on his tour of his region for the day, a randomly picked, Zone 4 London?suburb.

After embarrassingly dropping by, uninvited, to 30ish disinterested customers and making about zero sales, I made up an excuse to leave and ran for my life, later taking on a much less mortifying job as a barman.

That experience exemplifies salesmanship at its worst: trying to sell something to a group of people who don’t want or need your product. It was awkward, uncomfortable, disingenuous, and desperate. It reminds me of a lot of advertising I see these days.

There have been many iterations and terms to describe the top-of-the-funnel vs bottom-of-the-funnel work: long vs short, fast vs slow, brand vs performance, brand vs retail, push vs pull, emotional vs rational etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I am currently busy with Orlando Wood’s course entitled APE – Advertising Principles Explained. Orlando is the founder of System1 and the author of the brilliant book Lemon – Why Creativity Is in Crisis. He describes the two speeds of advertising as salesmanship versus showmanship. I like this. It’s straightforward and easy to grasp. It's also clear why many marketers tend to favour salesmanship in their advertising, particularly given the current sense of desperation in the world right now.

But, and it’s a very big but, we ALL overestimate the importance of USPs and differentiation and features and benefits and fall in love with our own products and brands. So, in the world of advertising, marketers try to sell or pitch their products to customers.

The major problem with the salesmanship approach is that it assumes you’ve been invited into the room and invited to deliver your pitch. The truth is you haven’t. And like the awkward man I followed around Zone 4, pitching something uninvited ain't going to get you far, no matter how good or bad the product is.

Of course, there are always a few customers who have invited you into the room. Let’s say 5% of your customers, and that’s fine; it’s important to close those sales. But if all your efforts are just salesmanship efforts, you're only speaking to the 5% and ignoring the other 95%. Realistically, the 5% are the only ones paying attention and they don’t justify the means.

The inconvenient truth is that for 95% of your consumers, you’re not in the room, and it’s likely there isn’t even a room. Those consumers you’re selling to are just not in the market right now. But they will be. At some point.

That’s where showmanship comes in. It’s entertainment. It’s emotional. Showmanship is an ad, but it doesn’t feel like an ad. And it’s way more important for the long-term success of your brand. It’s about building long-term growth now by drawing your future market towards you. It’s about building the room now so one day you will be invited inside to pitch the product when the time is right. The technical term for this is salience or mental availability, but really, it is this: will your market like and remember you when it comes time to buy?

Pretend that you have no idea how long it will be from now until the moment they enter the market (because you don’t) and ask yourself this: how long will the average consumer remember your current advertising? Or could you run your current advertising for a couple of years, and it will still feel fresh? If it’s not 2+ years, then you’re probably not doing the showmanship thing correctly.

The not-so-secret is this: Make something memorable (the hard part), and keep it running for a long, long time, and it will keep working for a long, long time. Hence, as they also call it, the long of it.

Side note: This isn’t to say you should stop altogether with salesmanship. Loads of studies show the compound effects of doing both at the same time. I like the argument that it’s Showmanship X Salesmanship. And if you want to know how much of each, go to this amazing calculator, and I guarantee, you’re spending too little on brand.