Marketing pioneer and creative genius David Ogilvy who is widely considered as ‘Father of Advertising’ or ‘The Original Mad Man’ has pointed out very essential and timeless principles of effective marketing. Though there are numerous principles of marketing and advertising, here are a few golden rules which every communication strategist must follow.
1- Give the Facts: Try to give relevant facts about your product. Talk more about the benefits of the products instead of speaking about salient features. It is very important to give the facts early.
2- Be Truthful: We need to be honest while communicating to our customers. Customers can easily find out if we try to mislead them. So follow the principle that “Good products can be sold by honest advertising.”
3- Be Helpful: Along with giving facts and being honest we should be helpful to our esteemed clients. Ogilvy basically focuses on two different kinds of helpfulness. These are helping the prospective customer understand your product and services and give them valuable information and advice.
4- Have a Big Idea: Every communication strategy must be based on a big idea, where the objectives must be specific and prioritised. Big ideas always stretch the band to sustain in the market. They resonate with consumers; have talk value and transcend cultural and geographical boundaries.
5- Stimulate Interest: It is very important to stimulate customer’s interest instead of boring them to buy your product or services. During communication, customers should be inquisitive to know about your product, try and capture their interest. For this you need to know who you are talking to, what he needs and how they can be motivated to show eagerness to know your offering.
6- Understand your Customer: It is very much tied up with the previous principles. If you don’t understand or know what interests your customer, what he needs or what he is looking for, then neither you can stimulate his interest nor trigger off your big ideas. Your consumer is not a moron. So be empathetic and try to understand what your customer cares about.
7- A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: It is very important to use a perfect picture to describe your product. It should be appealing at first sight.
8- Headlines with Immediate Impact: Always write a great headline to catch immediate attention of your target audience.
9- Don’t mess around: It is very important to make a perfect layout in which copy and image both go hand in hand without disturbing the layout.
10- Smart People: It is always important to hire smart people to work with. Always hire people who are smarter than you are. It is also very important to train them and get them into the process. Training should be a continuous process. The more your people learn, the more useful they can be to your clients.
