Is Advertising Really Falling?

The march 2006 issue of Marketing News includes an interview with Al Ries. In 1981, Al Ries and Jack Trout published one of the all-time best selling books on advertising, positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. more recently, al ries released a much more controversial book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.

The book was controversial because Al Ries, the former ad icon, suggests advertising is no longer effective in building brands. He suggests that advertising can be successful at maintaining brands, but advertising is no longer effective in putting a new idea into the consumer's mind.

He uses the internet companies of the late '90s as examples. Remember the pets.com sock puppet? Pets.com spent massive amounts of money on advertising. Unfortunately, the sock puppet outlasted the company. Al ries mentions that very few of the internet companies that tried to build brands through advertising were successful. The ones that did succeed usually did so with massive pr, not advertising - at least initially. Ebay and amazon and later google are good examples.

Do you agree? These were very large businesses with very large budgets. what about small businesses? If you are a small business owner, trying to build or further develop your brand, will you find more success building through PR or advertising?

If you are building a new brand or entering a new market, I suggest your resources will be much better spent on pr. the reason pr is more effective than advertising in building brands is something you'll see weaved throughout my posts - trust.

People buy from brands, companies and people they trust. If a customer has no previous experience with a product or service, pr is much more effective than advertising in initiating the trust building process. I'll talk about the components of trust and how pr impacts those components in another post. Al mentions one of the components (credibility) in his interview.

Here's a few Al Ries pointers excerpted from the interview:

• ...the notion of the enemy. what makes pr or a news story is controversy. so when you launch a new brand, an element of controversy is usually good. strategically, when you launch a new brand your first question is, 'who's the enemy.' then you try to generate news stories around that controversy.
• to be a good marketer, you have to develop the right strategy and identify the correct tactics to support the strategy.
• ...you need to use pr, blogs (hello) and word-of-mouth (e.g. networking) first because (your new brand) doesn't have credibility to be believable

Al Ries has been in the marketing business for 50 years. Do you agree or disagree with his points from the article?

by Rob Reed  web: www.terrakon.com   blog: www.marketingcentricity.com