Being a full-time marketer means I’m always thinking about marketing.
And it means I’m always alert to good advertising.
And especially alert to bad advertising.
Why?
Because there’s a hundred times more bad advertising than good advertising.
Take shop fronts, for example.
Every time I drive past local shops I’m amazed at the advertising opportunities they’re wasting.
For example…
There’s a furniture shop on a very busy road near where I live. And by busy, I mean it gets hundreds, if not thousands, of cars passing by every day.
And yet the sign on the front of their shop looks like this:
Exhibit A
It’s a big shop. It’s in a parade of shops, but it’s three or four times the size of the other shops.
And the owner’s name stretches the entire length of the shop front – in a huge font. So you can read his name from hundreds of metres away.
But the words “discount furniture” is a tiny fraction of the size. So you need to be right in front of the shop to know what they actually do.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
All that free advertising going to waste.
I mean, imagine how many more punters they’d get through their door if the shop front looked like this:
Exhibit B
So the question is…
Why do so many businesses get this wrong?
Two reasons.
The first is because of ego.
The business owner cares more about people knowing his name than putting money in the till.
The second reason is not thinking like a customer.
From looking from the inside out, not from the outside looking in.
So if they had any sense…
They’d bin their current sign.
And get a new one that features what they do, rather than who they are.
Because I guarantee it would pay for itself in the first week.
Disclaimer: I pulled the name “John Smith’s discount furniture” out of my arse. It doesn’t refer to an actual company.