nickshanagher

Who could not love a book that starts: “As a child I lived in Lewis Carroll’s house in Guildford. My father, whom I adored, was a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, a classical scholar and a bigoted agnostic. One day he discovered that I had started going to church secretly. “My dear old son, how can you swallow that mumbo-jumbo? It is all very well for servants but not for educated people. You don’t have to be a Christian to behave like a gentleman! “My mother was a beautiful and eccentric Irishwoman. She disinherited me on the ground that I was likely to acquire more money than was good for me without any help from her. I could not disagree.” Written more than 50 years ago, David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man has two strengths. First, it tells you how to be successful in business. Second, he shows how great brands are created by selling the big idea to as many people as possible. In 1988 Ogilvy added a preface to explain why he wrote the book. First, to attract new c...

There is an amazing fact near the start of Decoded, a new book from marketer Phil Barden. The average person takes 1.7 seconds to process the information in an advertisement in a magazine. But this does not really matter because all good marketing needs is this 1.7 seconds. People are programmed to respond quickly to the hundreds of thousands of things they “see” every day. If the marketing is right for what we are looking for, we will find the products we need. Even if we make mistakes, as we all do, all the time. But if we “were to reflectively think about every purchase decision in the supermarket, it would take so long to do our shopping that we would starve to death.” Barden’s work builds on the field of behavioural economics pioneered by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, whose brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow demonstrates that the way people behave is not as economists would like to think. In a chapter on optimising the path to purchase, Barden shows how good m...

  I found this photograph lurking in my draft box. I liked this advertisement because it projected a complex market proposition in a simple way. The design uses crossing out and naif lettering and numbers, which makes it look home made. Is this a local shop speaking or the giant corporation that is Tesco? Local retailers should be able to steal some of the ideas for their posters and marketing materials. Remember, this advertisement is not slap dash. It is calculatedly casual. Let me know if it works for you.