When to Advertise, and What Good Advertising Feels Like

Q. When do you need advertising the most?
A. When the market is down and things are slow.

Q. When do you need light?
A. When it's dark.

Good advertising creates leads, and leads create sales. And if you need sales now advertise and promote now.

There is a market today for your products, it just may be a little smaller so you will not realize the same ROI in a boom economy, but if you can still generate sales.

What's the alternative? Turn off the lights and wait for it to blow over. The problem is, every day you go without top-line sales revenue, you eat further into your reserves, and get closer to scraping bottom.

Take control, look for opportunities, trends, new ideas, new markets, new uses for an existing product, new ways to bundle or package your product that works better in a slow economy. Stay focused on the future and ways to get closer to your customers and solve their problems.

There are always opportunities, you just need to find them. Conduct a S.W.O.T. analysis, a focus group, a brainstorming session. Find the unmet need, that new or developing niche, and recreate yourself if you have to.

Good advertising connects with people, and offers hope, a bargain, a value, an escape, or a solution. Good advertising makes people feel good about themselves, or about you.

Good advertising makes people feel something about your brand, or about doing business with you. Good advertising fills a mental or physical void. It may make them feel smart, or happy, clever, cool, sexy, attractive, successful, satiated, above the crowd or in the know. But the more it makes people feel, the more it makes them spend.

Why do people do all the crazy and interesting things they do? Because they want to feel, they want to connect, they want to belong, and they want to be accepted, recognized, rewarded, or acknowledged.

A good brand experience, product or service fills these inate human needs. And a good ad tells them where and how. And maybe without even saying it. The implied message can be much more powerful than the stated.