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Upside
Down Marketing
By Michael Alan Hamlin
December 8, 2003
When an actor in a U.S. direct response commercial
implores viewers to, "Call now! Our Operators are standing
by," the operators are increasingly standing by in the Philippines.
Generally, call center operations are associated with customer and
help desk services. But the most profitable call centers are those
that don't just handle confused and angry customers. They sell.
But before the call center sales agent can sell, something has to
drive the prospective customer to her. It can be a published ad,
a radio commercial, or a television spot. Not surprisingly, a lot
of effort goes into creating advertisements and commercials that
have the qualities that will catalyze buying action by readers and
viewers. What is surprising are the qualities that do the catalyzing.
Recently Ron Bliwas, chief executive of ad agency A. Eicoff &
Co., spoke at Wharton about his agency's experiences with direct
response television advertising. A. Eicoff & Co. pioneered direct
response television in the 1960s, according to a recent article
in the Knowledge@Wharton newsletter. Bliwas says that studies have
shown that direct marketing not only catalyzes immediate impulse
buying, but also drives retail buying in traditional stores, with
a third of purchases the result of seeing a direct response television
commercial.
Many of Bliwas' rules for direct response television advertising
fly in the face of conventional marketing and sales theory. For
example, Bliwas swore that he has looked for a correlation between
ratings and sales results, but can't fine one. "Company researchers
discovered that shows with a 2-rating, for example, were more effective
in selling products than shows scoring 1- or 12-ratings points."
Rather than program viewership, the researchers found that "there
were certain times of day when it was easier to motivate somebody
to buy something," explained Bliwas.
He said the best time to reach potential buyers is weekend afternoons,
"when people are relaxed and have time to focus on advertising.
"People watch television for two reasons - to be entertained
or because they are bored. We try to run our commercials during
shows people are watching when they're bored because they will pay
as much attention to a commercial as they do a Hogan's Heroes rerun
they've seen a hundred times."
Stay at home mothers are best reached around 10:30 or 11:00 pm,
when they are finished taking care of their families and can relax,
weekdays. "We call it our theory of sales resistance,"
Bliwa explained. "It's actually better to reach 50,000 people
at a time of least sales resistance than 500,000 people at a time
of maximum sales resistance." Bliwa once ran a consistently
strong-performing ad before a major football game viewed by millions,
and got zero response.
Quality of the program is also a factor in deciding where to place
a direct response television ad. "The better the show, the
worse the results," Bliwa says. Bliwa said he "once flattered
Oprah Winfrey at a Chicago dinner party when he told her he refuses
to advertise on her show because people find the program too interesting."
They don't want to take the chance of missing part of the show by
getting involved in a sales transaction.
Great production quality doesn't necessarily mean that a direct
response advertisement will work, either. Bliwas said that the production
quality of a commercial his company once developed for Liberty Medical
was terrible, "but we put it on the air and it went through
the roof." A slicker follow up spot with the same actor later
bombed. So did a spot with the legendary Lauren Bacall.
In the original commercial, the aging female actor talked about
how Liberty Medical delivered diabetes-testing equipment right to
her home and handled the insurance paperwork. The second had the
daughter trying to help the mother, and then finding that her help
wasn't necessary, thanks to Liberty Medical. But it still created
an impression of dependence in the minds of viewers.
"We found this was the wrong message," Bliwas explained.
"They don't want to rely on their children." After the
commercial with Lauren Bacall bombed, the company looked for and
found a credible actor who simply asked viewers to "watch their
weight, exercise, and test regularly." The ad worked, because
it had the message right. Better quality production was nice, but
didn't determine effectiveness.
What does all this say about theories of marketing? Just this: Make
sure you're relying on the right theory for the right job.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001), and he is currently
at work on High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Asian
Professionals into Celebrities. Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2003 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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