Make Ads Work Using Proven Strategies

Art Business News, July, 2001 by Murray Raphel

Use tried and true advertising methods to bring in and keep valuable customers.

A Patient wakes up in a hospital room after an operation. She looks around and asks, "Where am I?" She doesn't ask, "How am I?" which you might think would be the normal reaction. Her first words are directed to a desire to be in a familiar situation.

Being in a familiar place is one of the basic messages that works for success in business. In fact, it is "one of the five ways advertising works" as determined more than 50 years ago by James Webb Young, a director of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and recognized by many as a dean of American advertising. Check your advertising to see if it meets one or more of his criteria:

1. Is it familiar?

2. Is it a reminder?

3. Is it newsworthy?

4. Does it stimulate action?

5. Does it add value to the product?

Let's look at these criteria one-by-one and examine how they'll work for your gallery or frame shop.

Be Familiar. People want to be in a familiar setting and/or buy a familiar product. Once buying habit patterns are set, they are difficult to change.

A readership survey revealed that people who owned or purchased a product were twice as apt to read an advertisement of the product than someone who never bought the product. Proof: When you send your direct mailer to your present customers, the response rate will be five to 20 times greater than when the same piece is mailed to people who have never bought from you.

Friends like to take you to a restaurant they enjoy, have you buy a car they like and suggest you purchase a book they have read. When people decide to buy art for their home or want a keepsake or favorite photo framed, do they look in the Yellow Pages for the place to go? Perhaps, but a stronger, more powerful choice is the one recommend by a neighbor or friend.

What you're trying to achieve is the answer for a game we played as children called "association." I say a word and they answer by saying the first word that comes into their mind. I say, "peanut butter;" they say, "jelly." I say, "art and framing;" they say the name of your shop.

That's also the reason you see commercials which repeat the name of the product over and over. The advertiser wants to implant the name in your subconscious so when you see it in the marketplace you respond with, "Oh yes, that name is familiar to me."

Be a Reminder. A few weeks before an election you are reminded to vote. Your shoe store sends notes to remind you the time has arrived for your children's new shoes. Your dentist or physician mails you a reminder note to call for your next appointment.

Much of today's advertising is not directed to purchasing a product as much as to remind you the product is waiting for you to come and buy it.

Look at the calendar. Every month has several holidays. Most offer a reason for buying something. Holidays are great opportunities to remind customers about the unusual, different and lasts-a-lifetime gifts in your store. Suggest an appropriate illustration for a customer's child's room in place of one of the many toys grandchildren receive on birthdays or holidays that are often forgotten or broken a few days later.

Be Newsworthy. Notice how many times you see the word "new" on soap and cereal products. That's because "new" is "news." Caution: Just because it is new does not mean sales will automatically increase. Only a tiny percentage of "new" products introduced every year succeed. The product or service must not only be new, but must also supply a need or be an improvement over a comparable product already on the market.

Opening a new department in your gallery? Carrying a new artist? Offering a "Frequent Framer" promotion? Having an early opening or later closing hours? Running a special promotion or sale you want your regular customers to know about before anyone else?

All these events are newsworthy. Give customers reasons to buy.

Stimulate Action. Young once ran a mail-order color page in Life magazine. The ad received a Starch "read most" rating of 20 percent of the circulation. But the response in orders was only one-tenth of one percent of the circulation.

What happened? People read the ad, but only a small percentage "acted" on the ad. The bottom line of good advertising is not how many awards are won at ceremonies but how much money comes into the register. It's desirable to give customers reasons to buy, but nothing happens if no sale takes place.

The average newspaper has less than 100 editorial stories and two to three times as many ads. How do you motivate readers of your advertising to the point when they come to your store?

The desire to act is there deep inside the consumer. How do we overcome inertia? Listing impressive numbers ("Look how many we sold of this artist's previous limited-edition print") is ho-hum. You must offer specific benefits.

Sometimes the choice of words will help. In England and Australia, "life assurance" is sold instead of life insurance. That has a different sound. If insurance pays when I leave, does life assurance mean I'm going to be around a while longer?