Get To The Point

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has endured the frustration of listening to their co-conversationalist saying “get the, you know, thingy”. “Can you pick that whatsit we talked about a couple of weeks ago”. "What was I going to say?” is another one; if I knew that, you wouldn’t have to ask.

There is a marketing lesson in all this. Given that you only have a couple of seconds to set the marketing hook, the marketer needs to come to the point as quickly as possible, otherwise the potential customer is gone. The only brand that successfully can avoid this rule is Guinness; in fact, if they took a ‘Ronseal’ approach, their public would be suspicious, so used they are to their traditional approach.

Around the time of this piece being written, one of our high street banks launched a campaign using black and white clips of conscience-stirring images of all the good and bad things that make us who we are. The first time I saw it, I was waiting for the Guinness logo at the end, and was startled to see that this was the messaging of said bank. Then I got a little annoyed, which is probably not the reaction the advertiser had in mind when it signed off on the creative. This is really the point; the marketer needs to take a straightforward line, otherwise if they’re ‘too clever’, then the whole thing is likely to backfire and have the complete opposite effect. Ambiguity is really a dangerous line to take. Unless you are Guinness.