Promoting new categories of service business can lead to a classic communications dilemma for clients and agencies.
Back in the pre-dot.com days of 1995, this agency won an exciting piece of new business, Car Shop. It was exciting for a number of reasons but particularly because it was a pioneering, interactive, on-line advertising service on Sky television (analogue at that time, of course) for people wanting to buy and sell used cars.
Looking back, Car Shop was a pretty clunky service that necessitated juggling with a telephone in one hand, the TV zapper in the other, and a pencil and pad on the knees. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that we were trying to market an entirely new category of product that the public had never encountered before.
A product described as a pioneering, interactive, on-line, SkyText TV-based advertising service for people who want to buy and sell cars doesn’t exactly offer you the snappiest tagline. Or a killer creative hook. But if you go off and concentrate on a simple consumer benefit, such as ‘Car Shop puts you in control’, it’s hard to avoid a degree of head scratching from a bemused audience.
‘But what does it do? What does it put me in control of?’ Our sixty-second DRTV commercials did their best to sort that out, but it was undeniably hard to keep the communication riveting from start to finish.
New categories of product obviously do need explaining, but quick-and-simple product demonstrations are not a ready option for most service businesses, and too much explanation can lead to very dull creativity.
So what’s the alternative? Flip it on its head. Grab the consumer’s attention - really grab them by the throat - but tell them little or nothing. They’ll be so intrigued, they’ll beat down doors to find out what you do and buy some of it. This is the route HHCL took when they launched First Direct. Nobody had run a telephone bank in Britain before. Nobody knew what it was. The solution was breathtakingly simple: you just run a poster depicting a couple of plastic buckets, and the intrigue factor will do the rest. What this exercise actually demonstrated was that, where too much explanation can lead to dull communication, too little can lead to apathy, frustration, or downright rejection of your overtures.
Are the choices so black and white?
Are explanation and engagement for new service categories really mutually exclusive? Of course not - although it has to be acknowledged that, the more innovative or complex the new category, the more challenging the communications task.
Solutions can be found in carefully structured campaigns that tease provocatively (but never for too long) then follow up hard and fast with the full, clear proposition and access to detailed fulfilment information, all with the strongest possible creative links. Or in multi-tiered campaigns that utilise a variety of communications tools concurrently to perform those tasks that each does best: TV and PR for profile and engagement, press advertising for development of the proposition and responsiveness, direct mail and the internet for detailed explanation and to close the business.
For a new initiative, getting the communications right is of the highest possible importance. A powerful creative execution that fails to connect because it seems obscure or irrelevant is just as much a waste of budget as the worthy campaign that no-one will read. Oddly enough, one of the best assets to the communication of a new service category is the early emergence of competition. It’s hard for one player to look like a credible proposition. Once you have competitors, all you have to do is prove you have the most credible proposition.
That’s normal advertising!
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