Ask the Readers: Do you find marketing materials effective?
One day I came home from a long day of work and found a purple Chinese food menu flier attached to the front gate of my apartment building. I saw “Free Chow Mein with order of $10 or more.” Oddly, that wasn’t the main selling point that got me to dial their number for a delivery. Usually I just toss fliers into the recycling bin, but this one was purple. Yes, I’m gay, and I like purple. Get used to it.
Of course my imagination ran wild and I pictured some very sophisticated marketing people telling the restaurant owners, “The Gays like purple. You’re in a gay neighborhood. Make your fliers purple.”
I dismissed the silly notion and went on with my life. But now, years later from that menu encounter, I find myself in school learning to design materials that will get people into stores and buy things. I’m wondering if I actually got roped into becoming a loyal customer through savvy marketing. Could they really have banked on the idea that a purple flier is more attractive to gay residents than some other color choice?
I’m going to say yes, and I’m basing that only on personal experience. I haven’t seen any other purple fliers hanging from my gate, just ghastly pastel ones that look unprofessional, lifeless and dull. I don’t bother with them.
But maybe it’s not the color choice: maybe I find the content layout sloppy, or the coupon offerings unexciting. Or maybe I’m just going through an extremely cheap phase and don’t want to read anything that is trying to get me to part with my money.
So many questions, so much uncertainty. I say let the readers decide.
[Photo by: roboppy.]
I can’t quite vote properly. My answer is “Sometimes. I find companies do a poor job of trying to reach me.” It depends on whether they’re offering something I want. I actually look at all junk mail and fliers on my door. (Right there, that shows you I’m a weirdo.)
I save menus for local places in a file folder, even ghastly pastel ones with distorted, poorly aligned type and bad English, because if I’m in the mood for Chinese food and am feeling too under-the-weather to want to go out, it will be nice to have that flyer. I have picked a plumber because of an advertisement in my neighborhood newsletter (because I knew they wouldn’t have a problem coming out to my low-cost neighborhood and thought they might empathize with a customer who wants quality at a good price with buying a bunch of whistles and bells). I’ve gotten new credit cards when I already had a perfectly good one because my junk mail explained about rewards cards.
Most advertising sickens me. It’s either stupid, ugly, over-the-top or otherwise horrible. Whenever I’ve actually interacted with advertisers, they seemed so far from knowing anything about what they were advertising that I generally don’t trust it. For example, when I worked at a camp, some kids were lined up to get a picture of them jumping into the pool to show how fun the camp was. They artificially upped the minority representation, and then we didn’t even let them swim afterwards for real. A beer company wanted to film people playing ultimate frisbee–people who later admitted they would never drink that beer. Someone wanted a picture of a worker bringing out drinks where customers always get their own drinks unless something was broken when they first tried.
I’m sure I’m not totally rational, though. Studies all agree that advertising affects people. People are even more likely to vote for someone they’ve heard of than someone they haven’t, even if the thing they heard was bad, for example. Arg, I hate that.
If someone wants to get me into a store to buy something, advertising will make it more likely if a) it teaches me that something I already know I want is available for a good or awesome price or b) there are pictures of things I might like (or even that I almost like, implying that there might be something else there that I like better) or c) it shows me something I never knew existed and explains why it’s so great (my favorite). It should go without saying that I prefer advertising that emphasizes what’s actually best about the products or services rather than what’s worst (implying that it’s the best).
I really haven’t paid as much attention to my habits as I should to say. I can say, however, that when a company does a really bad job with marketing, it sticks in my mind. All the TV commercials with extraordinarily bad or obnoxious sounds and images, all the fliers with poor formatting or bad/old information, and all the annoying Kia-esque commercials on the radio really stick in my mind when it comes to shying away from businesses. Some national companies even have very poorly made Web sites that are too difficult to navigate or don’t have the information I need, and I remember them.
With that in mind, I could say I’m a pretty simple guy, and just the company’s very presence in my life (as long as it’s not a bad impression) is enough to make me think of them if and only if I need a service/product. Otherwise, it all goes into the recycling bin!
I learned in my professional writing classes that blue, purple and green book covers actually sell better than yellow/orange ones. Then I made a point to pay attention to what I picked up off the shelf and why. Sure enough, I was drawn to book covers that displayed colors or photos I was interested in before I noticed the title or genre.