Advertising Good Deeds Makes Local Clients Rich
by Paul Weyland, reprinted with permission of RBR.com
“Be prepared, and be careful not to do your good deeds when there’s no one watching you.” -Tom Lehrer
As a former Webelos Scout, www.meritbadge.com, I can assure you that doing good deeds are always more advantageous when someone is watching you.
Local clients in every product/service category do good deeds for consumers every day, but few people know, because the clients don’t tell anyone. That’s too bad, because it is precisely these “good deeds” that should make up the majority of your client’s advertising efforts.
For example, instead of identifying and solving problems for consumers, the typical auto dealer’s commercials are usually only about the car dealer. “We sell more Fords than ANYONE. We’re number one! We’re three generations of _______family excellence! All of our mechanics are A.S.S. Certified! You’ll love our beautiful new showroom! We MUST sell 50 units THIS WEEK! Plenty of EAGER salespeople to assist you! We’re blowing out all 2010 models to make room for 2011!”
But when you drill deeper, you’ll find that most dealers have dozens and dozens of stories about how they helped customers beat the manufacturer in sticky warranty situations. These stories are worth gold in building consumer confidence toward the dealer. Drill even deeper and you’ll find even more good deeds the dealer has done for customers. Why is he hiding these stories?
Funeral homes are typically horrible advertisers. They love talking about their new facilities, the fact that that they are family owned and operated, about their easy “lay-away” plan and that their “sons Ed and Rick both work here.” Their ads are about as exciting as, well, a funeral home.
But dig deeper (sorry), and you find that most funeral directors have dozens of great stories about extraordinary things they’ve done to help families plan extraordinary funerals. Recently I spoke with a funeral home owner who was a real empath. He told me stories about customers who led wonderful lives, but had small funerals because they outlived their friends and relatives. He said, “It’s a shame. People should hear their stories.” I said, “Exactly. So, why aren’t you telling these stories in commercials?” These commercials would make him sound sympathetic, empathetic and very special to living people with similar life stories. “At _______Funeral Home, we remember.”
Family Grocers are becoming extinct. I met with an owner of seven stores. She has gigantic corporate competitors and every year she’s losing more market share to them. Her advertising consisted of very typical newspaper grocery ads and flyers, plus a little cliché television.
I dug deeper and she liked what we discovered so much she fired the newspaper, freeing up hundreds of thousands of dollars for radio and television. Some of the good deeds she does? Well, she still delivers groceries to senior citizens. The corporate grocers in her city don’t do that. She buys meat, produce, eggs, milk, everything she can from local farmers, because her state has high unemployment numbers and she believes in keeping local people in jobs (that one thing alone would get me to quit my grocer and come to her). Her corporate competitors don’t do that. She gives generously to local charities, like Safehouse for battered women. She helps her customers with recycling. Her employees will come out to your car, take your recycling inside and sort all of the cans and bottles for you so your hands don’t get wet and sticky. Then they bring you a voucher you can use toward your grocery purchase. The corporate stores don’t do that, either.
How many times have you been completely frustrated by a repairman who tells you that he’ll be there “sometime between 7:30AM and 6PM”? Could you please be more or less specific? For cripes sake, I have a job! I can’t afford to wait all day for the repairman to show up. Well, in the course of conversation an air conditioning/heating contractor revealed to me that he has dozens of customers who trust him so much they just leave their key under the mat for him. This is great for consumers, as they don’t have to wait for him. Why isn’t he advertising that? He’d make a customer out of me. In fact, he already has.
My 91 year-old mother-in law had a stroke. Suddenly all of her children are freaking out. Will she need to move to a nursing care facility? Can she afford home health care? Who pays? How expensive could this be? What about Medicare, Medicaid? Must she be indigent to take advantage of government care? What are her options? A million questions. Conflicting answers. My wife and her sisters are all over the Internet looking for concrete information.
The following week I’m talking to the administrator of a nursing home facility about marketing. Her advertising is all about the nursing home and not at all about people like me, old enough to have elderly relatives “circling the drain”, so to speak. I tell her about the questions my wife’s family is having. She says, “Oh, we get those questions every day. I have all of the answers.” I ask her why she doesn’t address the questions in her advertising, put a FAQ up on her website and then direct people to the website through her commercials.What a godsend that would be for people like…well, like my family. She loved the idea. She’s doing it.
A local hardware store advertises sales on television. He reads from a script. Every possible cliché appears in his commercials. He looks horrible and so fake. I ask him if, because of the economy, people are trying to do more home projects themselves. He says yes, he and his employees are always coaching people through doing things themselves. In fact while I’m standing there I hear an employee talking to a customer about replacing a commode. “Buy the biggest, thickest wax ring you can find or you’re going to have problems,” he says to the customer. I suggest to the store owner that every one of his commercials should revolve around teaching consumers how to do home repairs themselves. Introduce a project (in conversational vignettes, no scripts), and give the consumer a tip on how to make the job easier. Then send them to your website for step-by-step instructions. The hardware store owner is ready to begin his new campaign. He’s so convinced that this is the correct strategy that he’s ready to spend more money than he ever did before.
Perhaps the best good deed you could do for your clients would be in helping them discover and promote the good deeds they’re already doing for their customers, but are keeping secret from the rest of us. Good luck fellow Scouts, and don’t forget to “obey the law of the pack.”
