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ADVERTISING By far the most common and most controllable means of reaching your marketplace, often it is the foundation around which the rest of a campaign is planned. Like good sales literature, effective advertising identifies the customer's "pain" and shows how your company can cure it.

The two critical components of good advertising are the right message and the right media. The most carefully crafted ad is useless if it appears in the wrong publications. Likewise, the best media plan is wasted if the message is wrong.

Creating the right message means understanding the potential customer's "pain" – identifying what it is that causes the customer problems. Whatever the pain, your message needs to address how your product or service cures it.

Advertising is typically broken into two categories: Corporate (or image) advertising and product advertising. However, we practice a third type we call Hybrid Advertising™. Here's a brief overview of all three:

Corporate
Corporate advertising can be important because it can give the consumer a benchmark against which to begin judging individual products; eg., "The new Black & Decker power drill must be good because Black & Decker is well-known for tough, dependable tools".

Product
Product advertising differs from corporate in that it deals with specifics. Is this product going to be known for its speed? Price? Reliability? Product identity should be formulated around a need, or "pain". It is not enough to simply identify a product as being "Number One", or "The Best In Its Class". Neither of these cures a pain. Instead a product might offer "Closest Tolerances in the Industry", or be "The Only Double-Seal Environmental Shield".

Hybrid Advertising ™
This is the result of our belief that image and product advertising are not mutually exclusive. Instead we believe that you can build a company's image by using product advertising to tell a larger story. That is, use product to tell a story which demonstrates how a company cures a particular pain.

Here's an example: a medical tubing manufacturer makes high grade tubing that is essentially the same as everything else on the market. However, the advantage to buying this particular brand of tubing is the manufacturing process, which enables every piece of tubing to be identified and isolated by batch. The customer's pain is not the type of tubing – he can buy that anywhere – it's the inability to identify a particular batch of tubing in case something goes wrong in his manufacturing process. The result? An ad that sells not only a particular type of tubing (product advertising), but the advanced manufacturing process used by the advertiser to make it, demonstrating the company's forward thinking and customer-first attitude (image advertising). That's Hybrid Advertising™.

©2007 SCT Group, Inc.