• by Tom Hespos , May 11, 2004

Amidst the thousands of "buy my crap" messages you're exposed to everyday, how many of them extend value to you beyond the product message?

This Saturday, I went to a Home Depot in Riverhead, NY, needing sanding discs for my Makita sander. On my way into the store, I was distracted momentarily by a tall guy in an orange apron blasting dirt off a section of wooden fence with a power washer. Just outside the store, this guy was giving demonstrations and classes on how to use a power washer for residential tasks like cleaning fences and decks. I participated in the remainder of the seminar and ended up walking out of Home Depot with a new power washer.

In a world where consumers have an adversarial relationship with an ever-increasing number of commercial messages that reach them during the course of a typical day, messages need to be differentiated from the sea of "buy my crap" product-focused messages that seem to make up the majority. Especially in the case where a company is introducing themselves to the consumer in hopes of creating a long-term relationship, the message simply can't be geared toward creating product awareness. The marketer needs to extend value to the consumer, beyond simply informing the consumer about a product.

I used the Home Depot example above because it's a perfect example of a marketing philosophy. Home Depot can extend value in the form of education to the consumer as a relationship-building activity because it has the resources to do so, plus it positions Home Depot as the place to go when you need solutions to problems unique to homeowners. Going into the seminar, I understood that I wasn't obligated to buy anything and that Home Depot was extending this educational value to me not only to sell power washers, but also to ensure I had enough information to make an educated purchasing decision. That's how it got under my radar.

After I came home with my new power washer and stripped all the flaky paint off my garage doors, I took a break to surf the web for some information on vacations. In stark contrast, most of the ads I saw, while contextually relevant, were focused on last-minute deals, vacation discounts and "buy now" language. I couldn't help but think that a marketer would have made significantly more headway with me by offering up something like "Your Guide to What to Look for in Your Next Cruise Vacation." In searching out vacation information, I didn't see any ads that extended value to me beyond a discount or a limited time special.

Consumers are bombarded by these types of messages everyday. They don't build relationships or sustainable goodwill. They simply inform in a product-focused way. Why can't we take full advantage of this medium's relationship-building strengths and do better?

Before you set up your next DR-focused product sales campaign, think about whether or not the message is sufficiently differentiated from every other ad out there. Does the ad focus exclusively on hard-selling the product? Does it give the consumer any value beyond the information contained in the ad (or beyond a quick 10% off for clicking now)? Does it give the advertiser more than a quick spike in their sales numbers? Or does it help to foster relationships with the consumer?