Better known as: Guess who has never sold an auto-mobile in his life!
Please answer me this: “Why, despite mounting evidence to the fact that Marketing & Sponsorship do not have as much effect on sales as trumpeted, do we still put our faith in Marketing & Advertising “Experts”?
Incidentally, an interesting piece of research has just emerged which confirms what I have long suspected, whilst, at the same time, going along with my suspicion about the creative ego and the use of very high priced Hollywood directors!
Advertisements starring high profile celebrities such as David Beckham and Jamie Oliver do not sell products as well as those featuring every day people, new research suggested.
A study by the University of Bath and the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, found that ordinary members of the public are more effective in selling products than super stars paid millions to endorse them. That’s because people are more worried about keeping up with the Joneses than the rich and famous!
Never-the-less we guarantee that those Advertising Agencies will keep on using highly paid Hollywood movie directors as well as using the rich and famous as models…there goes millions more of the poor old clients budget…again…again…again!
Then just consider the example of high powered sponsorship. For the past nine years, Tiger Woods has endorsed GM products around the world and been heavily associated with the Buick brand in the U.S., Canadian and Chinese markets.
The golfer, according to Business Week magazine in October, was ranked the most powerful person in the sports industry.
Buick has been involved with golf since 1950, when it became one of the PGA Tour's initial sponsors, and it is still the tour's official car through 2010.
GM's overall vehicle sales were off 20.4 percent through October, while Buick brand sales were down 23.6 percent.
Never-the-less Tiger Woods, despite an overwhelming fee, reputed to be in the region of $8 millions per year, was unable to lift sales of Buick once in eight years of association.
It is a fact that the apparent logic of Global Marketing & Capitalism is hard to resist.
More than anything else in the past ten years, we have seen sport continuing a curious and unheralded metamorphosis. A hundred years ago, organised sport was a cultural sideshow, an amateur endeavour.
Now, in effect, the influence of sportsmen has been channelled towards one purpose and one purpose only: selling on behalf of the multinational corporations whose products they endorse. The logic of Global Capitalism?Marketing/Advertising et al, was hardly likely to be resisted in an arena that has become wedded to big money as modern sport. What appears to be certain is the fact that the alliance between sport and giant corporations is here to say. Despite the emerging evidence as to the little, if any, benefit on throwing huge sums of money to highly unreliable sports persons!
There are many emerging evidences that Marketing/Sales Promotion/Advertising/Sponsorship, call selling what you will, has never worked in any of its many & various forms. In any form corporations appear to treat their customers with utter dishonesty! Customers who are too trusting, too busy, too idle to challenge companies are, it seems, regarded as fair game – sheep to be fleeced!
Treating loyal, unquestioning customers badly is becoming endemic across large tracts of the British Service Industry. Certainly in Banking and Insurance it is de rigueur, as it is among mobile phone operators and broadband providers.
Without a doubt Markets are imperfect and capitalism can be terribly dispiriting most of the time. It would appear that the greater the distance between the staff and customer, the greater the likelihood of unscrupulousness!
Without a doubt the whole area of advertising & marketing is becoming more questionable, consider this: "Every day you’re exposed to more than four hours of media. Most of it is optimized to interrupt what you’re doing. And it’s getting increasingly harder and harder to find a little peace and quiet…The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they’re interrupting us even more!
"That’s right. Over the last thirty years advertisers have dramatically increased their ad spending. They’ve also increased the noise level of their ads - more jump cuts, more in-your-face techniques - and searched everywhere for new ways to interrupt your day.
"It’s estimated that the average consumer sees about one million marketing messages a year - about 3,000 a day…That may seem like a lot, but one trip to the supermarket alone can expose you to more than 10,000 marketing messages! An hour of television might deliver forty or more, while an issue of the newspaper might have as many as one hundred. Add to that all the logos, wall-boards, junk mail, catalogues, and unsolicited phone calls you have to process every day, and it’s pretty easy to hit that number.
"There is one critical resource, though, that is in chronically short supply. Bill Gates has just as much as you do. And even Warren Buffet can’t buy more. That scarce resource is time. And in light of today’s information glut, that means there’s a vast shortage of attention.
This combined shortage of time and attention is unique in today’s information age. Consumers are now willing to pay handsomely to save time, while marketers are eager to pay bundles to get attention.
"Interruption Marketing, including Sponsorship, is the enemy of anyone trying to save time. By constantly interrupting what we are doing at any given moment, the marketer who interrupts us not only tends to fail at selling his product, but wastes our most coveted commodity, time. In the long run, therefore, Interruption Marketing is doomed as a mass marketing tool. The cost to the consumer is just too high.
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