Martin Roche offers some advice on how investment promotion agencies can use advertising ti its best effect.

Lord Leverhulme, who built the giant soap-making business Lever Brothers into a global business, was one of the founding stars of marketing. He had a deep understanding of advertising and how to make it work. Famously, he was the person who said that 50% of his advertising was wasted, but he did not know which 50% it was. Even today, it takes a lot of expensive research to find out what proportion is wasted and what is hitting the target.

While good advertising works, bad advertising can diminish the reputation of the advertiser. Money is wasted and the advertiser forced to invest more heavily to recover lost ground.

Good advertising has to have the power to grab attention; it has to express core benefits and differentiate a product or brand from its competitors. But a significant amount of economic development advertising fails to follow these simple rules. Advertisers say too much in too little space. First-class advertising consistently concentrates on building and reinforcing target audience perceptions.

The famous catch line for Nikon cameras: “We take the world’s greatest pictures,” is a wonderful example of implying benefits and triggering a wide range of positive emotions in the mind of the reader. The Nikon line became the umbrella under which an endless streams of technical developments were advertised. It developed a strategy and applied it with imagination and discipline over many years.

In my experience the death knell of all effective marketing communications is “marketing by committee”. Making communication decisions by committee (or just having too many influential people expressing a view) frequently results in some poor copywriter trying to satisfy all the parties. What comes out might massage local egos, but it’s unlikely to capture the attention, imagination or interest of the person 2000 miles away that you are trying to reach.

What’s your point?

There is a fundamental point of all marketing communications that is easy to lose in the process of developing advertising. All communications should be about getting the target to take action, whether it is physically to respond to an invitation to buy or get in touch, or just to think better of a brand or a place.

The first question to ask is what makes us really different? This can range from a big strategic point, like a credible national drive to build up a food processing industry, to perhaps an economic statistic that conveys perceptions of success.

Picture in your head an advertisement that says: “In the past two years our air traffic has grown at twice the global rate.” That line does and says a lot. Firstly, it is different enough to invite readers’ attention. It tells people you have got connections, suggests that there has to be some good economic reason for such a rate of growth. Success breeds success. On one fact a persuasive advertisement can be built and a location given a more powerful positioning.

If an advertiser has the time and money it is usually a good idea to commission market research, but a great many development agencies can’t afford such expensive, if hugely helpful, comfort blankets. This is where courage comes in. Banish all advertising committees. Appoint the best creative agency you can afford and invite them to help formulate all your communications strategy and create your advertising. Be prepared to take risks, because boring advertising is like setting fire to dollar bills. But good advertising is worth its weight in gold.

Martin Roche is MD of UK-based brand and communications consultancy Anchor Reputation Management