Understanding the Goals and the Obstacles of Advertising
To understand why we go about this process in the way that we do, it’ll help to gain a perspective on how advertising works and the obstacles that are typically at play when seeking to achieve your goals.
Firstly, the goal of advertising is to increase sales by enabling buyers of the category to select the brand at their time of need or want.
So how does advertising enable sales? Simply put, advertising is a form of communication to buyers from the brand to let them know they have a solution.
Although, it’s very important to point out that the vast majority of potential buyers are not ready to buy at any given point in time. In B2B contexts, it’s been coined as the 95:5 rule (less than 5% are ready). This isn’t 5% of people who see your ad — it’s 5% of all potential category buyers, whether they see your ad or not. That means most of your audience today won’t buy today, but many will later — and your brand needs to be the one they remember.
This has a profound implication advertising and this fact alone is something that most business professionals are ignorant about, or negligent about. This unfortunately breeds both unwanted noise and unethical (sales) practices, which also creates ad avoidance (creating yet another obstacle for us).
The implication of most buyers needing the solution later, us that advertising must be remembered later. To go an extra step, the goal of the marketer is to have the brand be remembered in the most common scenarios when buyers enter their buying cycle. Scientifically, these are named Category Entry Points (CEPs).
If we want our brand to be remembered, it helps to understand how memory works—specifically, that emotion enhances the strength and longevity of memories. This is due to the amygdala, a brain region involved in processing emotion, which boosts the encoding and consolidation of emotional experiences.
Since emotion plays such a key role in our ability to remember, it must play a key role in advertising for those ads to perform optimally.
Shepherd®’s process
Prerequisite Voyager tasks: Basic customer research (CEPs).
The following is a process used to develop a creative output using a series of questions to induce a strategically relevant and emotionally powerful message. Shepherd® has developed this over years of experience, practice, learning and is still perfecting and improving on it to this day. We believe this is one the most valuable services we offer, given how often we see multi-million dollar campaign ideas fall short of the quality we can produce using these steps.
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