Imagine a future where opportunities for generating more sales, growth and development, hiring the smartest people and then hanging on to them, were lost: Lost, simply because the business leader was thinking in terms of a world that doesn’t exist any more.

If you are over 30 then you went to school in the 1980’s and 90’s. Your education in business (either practical or academic) will have begun shortly afterward and will have been based on materials produced some years before. Even the ‘latest’ thinking took some time to make it into workplace development programmes and even longer to filter through to academic institutions. For people of my age (and considerably younger) 1990 doesn’t seem so long ago. Yet in 1990 the world was a very different place: To start with, the internet just didn’t exist. A search engine was something to with fire and rescue and social networking was a night down the pub. Only ‘yuppies’ and posers had mobile phones (about 1 in 60 adults – the thought of kids having them would have been laughable), and pocket pagers were about as high-tech as most people got. In 1993 when Bill Clinton was elected as US President there were a grand total of about 50 websites. In that same year America On Line (AOL) and Delphi started to connect their proprietary email systems to the internet and the most asked question the following year on help desks was ‘What do I do with an email address?’. 

We meet potential partners differently. We apply for jobs differently. We book our holidays differently. We shop differently. We book restaurants and theatre or cinema tickets differently. We buy train or airplane journeys differently. We even sell off our unwanted goods differently; Ebay, eharmony. Jobsite, lastminute and the online versions of every store on the high street all add up to a very different reality for young people who have never experienced anything else.

 

Because the world is different, we have developed different expectations. Our ‘motives for action’ (motivations) have changed because the experience of living has changed. To get to the bottom of what drives us now requires the deconstruction of all the assumptions built up from our OLD experience of the world, and a whole new set of expectations identified that are relevant and true for what exists today. It’s true in every aspect of business and particularly powerful when it comes to advertising and sales.

 

The fundamentals however still remain the same; advertising works when it brings value to the customer: It’s a pretty simple equation; the more the perceived value of the information, the more likely it will result in a sale. A small example: I picked up a new business magazine today called ‘Mind Your Business’ (www.mindyour-business.co.uk). The magazine is very nice, and as a regional support for local businesses I wish them well in engaging their audience. However what’s interesting are the adverts: In days gone by advertisements were a great method of adding value by bringing information to a customer that they otherwise would not have had access to. Back in the nineties the most common ways of finding your way to a product was either through some product catalogue (or advertisement) or through yellow pages. The need was information and the value that publishing an advert added was in the information it provided. That however just isn’t the way the world works any more. There is no added value in information about a product. If a purchaser wants to buy something they now have Google at their fingertips. An advert listing the benefits of a product is literally valueless.

 

The only way adverts can add value to the new psychology of the purchaser is to give something that can’t be gained elsewhere. It has to add value that addresses a problem the purchaser already has and that will be helped (or better still solved) by their product. Flicking through ‘Mind Your Business’ I notice an ad for a rail service featuring the ‘benefit’ of faster journey times. It’s not clear at first glance, faster than what? There are a couple of car adverts with a straight list of features (not even benefits), a convention bureau who’ve almost pinpointed an added value by targeting stress reduction but then drop back into a simple list of benefits. There’s a museum and a football club extolling their location and ‘the power of football’ respectively as their features of note. The advert of an IT company and a group of pubs also don’t get any where near addressing the issue of adding value to a specifically targeted group of potential customers. They are all very nicely produced ads. The trouble is they are little different to ads that were produced that way twenty years ago. They are not wrong, they are just psychologically inappropriate for the world as it is today.

 

The back page of the magazine gets closer to being effective. It’s an advert for a delivery company. The headline is simple; it say’s ‘Delivering YOUR commitment to YOUR customer’. It shows a nice picture of a shiny van on the move and then clear contact details. No features. No benefits. Just a straightforward sentiment aimed at adding value by meeting a need they know their potential customers already have – a need to fulfill a commitment.  Adverts don’t have to be clever but they DO have to be cleverly targeted and cleverly add value to a potential customer.

 

It’s not just adverts that need to be designed with the reality of today’s real world in mind, but every aspect of the way we do business.

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