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Excerpt from the Advertising chapter of The Product Marketing Handbook for Software

The Advertising Framework

Advertising high-tech products requires a solid conceptual framework of how, where and why advertising works. The high-tech industry is littered with unsuccessful and ineffectual ads that were developed by professionals and placed at reasonable prices. To create successful ads, you must understand both the psychological and the physical mechanics of advertising. Only then can you begin to fashion advertising that effectively manages and shapes a buyer’s perception of your company and products.

To that end, we have developed a new paradigm for understanding, creating, and evaluating your advertising. Using this structured approach, you will be able to classify ads, understand their basic emotional appeal, analyze their fundamental components, and examine the psychological world in which buying decisions take place. Armed with this new “ad space” model, you will be better able to create ads that attract and persuade customers to buy your products.

AD TYPES

There are only two kinds of ads: those that sell a company, and those that sell a product or service. The purpose of selling a company is to enhance the company’s image and ultimately build brand equity, making it more likely that a prospective customer will buy the company’s products and/or be willing to pay more for them. These ads usually focus on one of three themes:

• We’re big.
• We’re better.
• We’re going to be around.

Do they work? Unless you can bring overwhelming force to the marketplace, as in the case of large companies such as Microsoft, Intel, or IBM, they are probably not worth the expense. Buyers tend to focus more on functionality and price issues and less on who the company is. In addition, the computer market has proven to be a bad place to brag about your longevity and invincibility. Remember Wang, Atari, Commodore, VisiCorp, MicroPro, or Ashton-Tate? High flyers like Borland and Corel have had their wings clipped, mega star Netscape was forced into AOL’s embrace, mighty IBM has been humbled, and even Microsoft and Sun are concerned about Linux. Unless you have the deepest of pockets, you don’t have the money to run these ads.

To understand why ads attract and persuade people to buy certain products, let’s examine the four basic ad types: transformational, transferal, protective, and assuagement.

Transformational

A transformational ad is the most powerful of the four types as it literally promises to change you from one thing to another. Some of the most compelling examples of transformational ads are found in religious advertising. The power TV evangelists have over their followers and the seeming ease with which they coax dollars from their mainly blue-collar audiences is quite astounding. At their core, religious ads promise to hurl the devil from your body, scrub your soul clean enough to allow you to enter heaven, and, in some cases, cure you of physical sickness. A very powerful claim, and one with universal and eternal appeal.

Children are always receptive to transformational ads. Many successful children's toys and publications focus on transformation; indeed, a popular line of toys in the 90s were called the "Transformers." Most successful comic books portray an ordinary individual transformed into a superhero or heroine via bites from radioactive spiders, exposure to chemicals, visitations from aliens, or something equally fantastical.

And secular adults are hardly immune to the power of transformational advertising. A quick look at the plethora of ads for cosmetic potions that promise to turn the middle aged into fresh-faced youngsters, and exercise devices that will transform couch potatoes into muscular athletes, confirms this. The eternal appeal of these ads can be judged by shopping at any outlet or garage sale, where last year’s ab smasher, herbal panacea, and miracle cream can be picked up at a fraction of their original price, replaced by this year’s biceps pounder and miracle vitamin.

Despite its undoubted power, transformational advertising has been infrequently used in business software marketing, though some Internet advertising has edged close to the promise of creating a new you via a web browser and E-commerce. Transformational ads are more common in the gaming and entertainment markets, though they are almost always delivered with humor and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. It is interesting to note that online games such as Ultima and EverQuest, which allow players to literally transform themselves into heroic adventurers or mythical beings, have been solid financial successes.

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