Three advertising laws to reinforce product branding

I recently finished reading Lee Siegel’s last book Against the Machine, where Siegel gives us a critical view in regards to the Internet-phenomenon.
In his book, he describes the Internet as more than just a collection of convenient services that helps us create (as well as to live in) a “better world”; Siegel wants to focus reader’s attention on the social changes the Internet has brought, deeply translating our human experiences, sometimes in a negative way.

The writer’s main thesis is that the Internet is encouraging a “popularity culture”, a culture where the only relevant point is just to be, popular, to be known by surfer’s great majority. To better explain his point of view, he refers to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point as the perfect explanation of the recipe for gaining the popularity desired; recipe definitely and thoroughly applicable to our Internet’s age.

Personally I think he’s got the point, but, in this occasion, I will not give my neither positive nor negative insight regarding Siegel’s judgment. I just want to highlight Gladwell’s three most relevant suggestions, quoted by Siegel in his book. In my opinion, these suggestions (labeled by Gladwell as “laws”) can be used to quickly and efficiently explain how to be successful today in the advertising market.

“Law of the Few”

You need to find an influential figure to spread your concept. Do you need some example of these figures? Which is the most influential and used search engine of the Internet? Google! Which site has the highest page views? Yahoo!. So, the first rule for an advertiser to gain popularity is being visible on the most popular sites.

“Stickiness Factor”

You have to have a message that makes an impact and sticks in people’s head. Just think about Kylie Minogue’s song Can’t get you out of my head, your ads should to be like the refrain of that songs: you cannot really get it out of your head. Likewise, you should be original, using appealing ads and interesting claims, shouting what you are offering to potential customers, creating the “hype” and trying to catch their attention in order to push them to want your product. You have to engage them from the very beginning up until the very end of a sales lead.

“Power of Context”

You have to be sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the time and place you live in. You need to know what is “in” and what is “out”, you should be up-to-date, as trendy as you can, not just following fashion’s trends, but even being able to understand the direction the market is aiming towards. You should adapt yourself not only to the present but even for the upcoming future.

These, in my opinion, are the three foremost suggestions for making an efficient advertising campaign; Gladwell’s laws have been posted 8 years ago, but they are more useful than ever.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under New Media Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.