The best marketers I know start with an idea, do a minimum of research, trust their instincts and then move ahead… quickly, making necessary changes on the fly.
The idea part is driven by a simple belief that you, the marketer, are just like everyone else. If something appeals to you, it probably appeals to others like you, and that means millions of people. I don’t need to be a woman to understand the desire to look young… so even though I may not use wrinkle cream or would ever try Botox, I came up with the headline “Better than Botox?” for a face cream. We told a simple, believable story about how it worked (we weren’t sure and we said so) and how it was discovered (dumb luck).
Half a billion dollars or more later, the product is still selling. No testing of the ad concept, just a few anecdotal bits of research about the look and feel of the final product. The ad remained essentially the same for six years, and ran unchanged in dozens of countries, even though ‘experts’ in each country would insist that we had to change the ad to fit the market. We refused… and became the #1 skin care cream in France using a literal translation and the exact design of the original ad. (Still, the marketing ‘experts’ at the company that sold the product and made a ton of money won’t admit they were wrong about the need to make the ad ‘French’. I guarantee that if you send them an American-style ad today, they will DEMAND that it has to change to meet the French market. Old, stupid habits die hard!)
Women are women… looking younger is a good thing… the product was the first to hit the market with a then uncommon, but now very common, ingredient. Had we waited to test, we would have risked losing most of the $500 million-plus. And what information could we have gathered that would have changed the ad?
“Consumers want a new story... authenticity, not spin... participation, not propaganda.”
