Out of the Box

How Direct Should a Marketing Message Be?

By Menachem Lubinsky on February 29 2008

America may very well be on the verge of electing a president whose central theme is “change.” Some marketers actually feel that despite its obvious vagueness, it is a stroke of genius, not because Barak Obama lacks the oratory skills to make his case, but for choosing a theme that conjures different things to different people. If you are unhappy with the war in Iraq then change is for you, if you despise the way Washington conducts business, then change is a good theme to subscribe to and if you believe that the health care system in this country is a mess, then you should certainly buy into the change message.

The bottom line is that Obama’s message strikes enough responsive chords wherever he goes, which is why he so rapidly went from being an underdog to emerging as a frontrunner. It is impossible to find fault with a word or slogan that hits its target with so many different people.

So what happened to the advantages of saying more rather than less? Many marketing professionals have always counseled to describe a product in as much detail as possible to appeal to as broad a base of potential customers as possible. The logic was that by listing diverse virtues of a product, there is a better chance that a customer might take to one of the features and buy the product.

Now perhaps after slogans like change, there is talk about a flipside. The new school of thought is to use a term that has broad appeal in the hope that it would perhaps have different connotation to different people and at least whet the appetite of a potential consumer. As an example, VISA uses the slogan “Life Takes VISA” which is designed to transform a cold concept of plastic as a replacement for cash to a concept that becomes part of your life. In other words, whatever your concept of life or the good life is, make VISA part of it.

Compare that to the old American Express slogan of “Don’t Leave Home Without It.” That message was almost like a threat that leaving the house without American Express will somehow deprive you of going about your life. GEICO has turned the whole idea of life with GEICO into a more humorous experience that makes people think of GEICO as a problem solver, which is what insurance is supposed to do.

There was a time that marketers thought that challenging and even provocative terms were good only as teasers. Communications companies used to show emotional photos of family reunifications and a mother-daughter conversation as a way of getting you to pay attention to their brand. But after the teasers, the marketers insisted on a full message. In other words, enough with the fluff and out with the whole story.

Truth is that Obama has been saying different things about issues that affect Americans. He is an extraordinary orator and Americans take to leaders that are good at speechmaking. Think of both Presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan, and you have leaders that were not known for their oratory skills. But some Presidents compensate with sincerity or even memorable slogans. President Clinton is a good speaker but not of the Obama ilk that can fire up an audience.

So the combination of a concept like change with strong speechmaking skills gives him a formidable presence with an audience and probably accounts for his surge. That may precisely be like a good product with good packaging that has a good slogan. On the other hand, we often encounter products that require more definition. For some reason, the product doesn’t “jump out” at you as many consumers are apt to say. One liners and challenging words might not be enough to give the product the necessary boost with consumers.

So if the question on whether it is better to say more or less sounds like “it depends,” you are correct. A candidate that has the depth, track record and background and is a good speaker is in the enviable position of being a frontrunner and the candidate to beat. But Americans rarely get such a choice. Some might tell you that John F. Kennedy was the closest to being such a candidate, although some critics at the time faulted him for his lack of experience despite being a Senator and, of course, he was the first Catholic to run for office. All told his charisma, personality and oratory skills carried the day just after America had said good- bye to an octogenarian Dwight D. Eisenhower.

There is yet another school of thought in this equation that says that the “t depends” response could be carried over to whether the product is part of a category that triggers an automatic response or whether it is part of a category that begs for a definition. In other words, if you are marketing luxury cars, everyone already knows what it represents (i.e. status, lifestyle, and social strata). The only nuance that needs clarification is the model and perhaps a feature that stands out over the other models.

There is also the issue of the environment of the marketing challenge. Mr. Barak is banking on the hope that there is enough dissatisfaction in the rank and file of American voters that “change” is the one word that cuts across many lines. In planning a successful marketing campaign, the choice of one-worders or elaborate descriptions certainly “depends.”

Out of the Box is a collection of strategic marketing articles that Lubicom has published on various topics, trends and ideas in the marketing world. The articles have been published in the Hamodia weekly newspaper circulated on three continents to a readership of well over 100,000.

The name, "Out of the Box" is a term used frequently in business nowadays to describe creative thinking that is not the norm. It is meant to help a business pull away from the pack or separate oneself from the competition. It is to some extent fraught with risk, simply because it is not the run of the mill thinking, but it is at the same time the key to reaching the next opportunity.