Another way advertising can hurt you

Get your head around this trippy inference, expressed at The Power of Influence: Coming soon - Advertising damages your brand. Here's how it goes:

Brands that need to use traditional advertising are not getting (enough) personal recommendation to succeed.... Brands that have to rely on traditional advertising are not as good as ones that succeed through word of mouth.... Advertising will actually damage a brand's reputation

Not as weird as it might sound. You may have noticed the impulse in people around you: Folks sometimes distrust brands that seem "over-marketed." They search for better, more obscure, the recommended-by-someone-cool.

A generation ago, advertising helped "validate" brands. Not so much any more.

What does this mean to nonprofits? We seldom have the budgets to overexpose ourselves and saturate television with spots. But do we ever "try too hard" and create the impression that we don't really have much to offer?

If we get our cues from the advertising world, we probably make the same mistakes they make. But more imortant -- and more likely -- we should be asking ourselves if we're offering donors something truly remarkable to do. Something that would actually spread through word-of-mouth, making advertising unnecessary.

Technorati Tags: advertising, fundraising

Comments

[Dan Vander Plaats]

Mikemuses:

The only difficulty in challenging donor's misconceptions is that we very easily end up speaking a language they don't understand. For instance, our challenge at a social needs ministry is to spread the message that we benefit from being in fellowship with people with disabilities. Yet, our donors largely don't have that experience and would not respond to an appeal that tried to convince them of our message's validity. They want to know one thing when they're thinking about giving: did we do something that helped a handicapped kid? That is their conception of the problem and what they/we can do to solve the problem.

We have taken the track of using our donor newsletter to share stories of how wonderful it is to be blessed by someone with a disability, and that is the best place to at least begin to challenge donor misconceptions. The best place, of course, is face-to-face or over the phone discussion.

[Mikemuses]

To a point, I think this is something that needs to be considered, but having read the post at 'The Power of Influence', the thing that jumps out (OK, apart from the poor spelling, the thing that jumps out) is 'when did you last see an advert for a really really good restaurant?'

Well this city's best goes by rep alone, but the best in a crowded market, advertises. (Indian fusion, multi-award winning). Now I knew it was good, but it's taken the ads to tell me it's multi-award winning.

Now I think about it, I have seen ads for the best one too. The common theme was telling people things that we didn't know based solely on their reputations and word of mouth. And this is where some charities maybe still need to do work - telling people what they don't know about us - challenging misconceptions, perhaps.