"Advertising is actually a simple phenomenon in terms of economics.
It is merely a substitution for a personal sales force - an extension,
if you will, of the merchant who cries about his wares."
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In one of the favorite debates in the field of advertising, the question is whether advertising is an art or a science. Rosser Reeves stood very firmly on the side of science in this debate. He was known to demand valid, reliable research, and he even helped to create what was called the "Copy Laboratory" at Bates.
One of his more controversial assertions was that "originality" is the most dangerous word in advertising. He claimed that the egos of some copywriters caused them to value the creativity of the ad over the selling message about the product, which results in the waste of clients' money.
Rosser Reeves book portrays him as a practical advertiser, with a lot of common sense, and a distaste for "show window" ads which merely make the product look pretty, but contain no selling message. He had little tolerance for people who wrote about advertising without understanding it the way he did. For example, he scoffed at Vance Packard¡¯s book Hidden Persuaders, which claimed that advertising unfairly played on the mass's unconscious motivations. Reeves pointed out that individuals spend fortunes and years on the analyst's couch to understand their own deeper motivations, so it was preposterous to assume that an advertising copywriter understood the subconscious motivations of millions of people. Reeves called Hidden Persuaders "gibberish." In his book Reality in Advertising, Reeves also attacked John Kenneth Galbraith's assertion that advertising¡¯s "central functions is to create desires -- to bring into being wants that previously did not exist." According to Reeves, "if the product does not meet some existing desire or need of the consumer, the advertising will ultimately fail." He also laments that the popularity of the USP does not reflect a wide-spread understanding of the term. He defines the USP in three parts: Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. 1. Each advertisement must say to each reader: ¡®Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit. 2.The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique -- either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising. 3.The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product. Reeves recommended thinking of the USP as something the consumer takes from the ad, rather than as something the copywriter puts into the ad. Reeves pointed out that, "New forms of transportation do not create the desire for transportation...Do not confuse a type of shoe with the desire for shoes. Do not confuse a method of labor saving with the desire not to be a drudge.¡¯ As for Galbraith¡¯s assertion that products are not needed, Reeves quoted Pat Steel, "People don¡¯t really need these things. People don¡¯t really need art, music, literature, newspapers, historians, wheels, calendars, philosophy...All that people really need is a cave, a piece of meat, and possibly, a fire." |