Tell it like it is

If I said to you ‘by using Big Red Moose marketing services, you could quadruple your turnover inside twelve months’, you would probably be a little sceptical. You may be right to, although we could be correct, and that really is the point; the use of words such as ‘could’, ‘might’, and ‘may’. Is this an innate desire to dream brought about the seeming obsession we have for gambling? ‘You could be a millionaire by this time tomorrow’. ‘You could win up to a million dollars by using our twenty free spins’. I’m sure you get the drift. For Pity’s sake, I saw an advertisement for a bingo comparison site the other day.

While this seems a fairly innocuous way of marketing, it could be argued that it undermines not only the validity of the product(s) concerned, but of marketing itself. The danger is that once this type of marketing gets a real hold, then it becomes the norm, and all marketing becomes based entirely on speculation. In the immortal words of The Doobie Brothers, ‘What were once vices are now habits’. Mercifully, I don’t think that this will be the case; whilst there are some undeniably thick members of society, I happen to believe that the majority have far more gumption to be taken in by this for too long. Let’s hear it for Ronseal.