6 Evergreen Branding Lessons From Marketing Master David Ogilvy

1. “Clearly define your positioning: What and for Who?”

According to Al Reis and Jack Trout’s bestseller, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, brand positioning “identifies and attempt to ‘own’ a marketing niche for a brand, service or product using strategies that include pricing, promotions, distribution, packaging and competition.”

It creates unparalleled impression on the potential customer’s mind and this is why, when done correctly, brand positioning can influence customer decisions in the favor of the brand.

Here is how you can create a strong brand positioning:

2. “Do your homework. Study your consumer in detail.”

Time and again, marketers have stressed on the importance of performing thorough research on your market and target audience.

Easier said than done, as there are millions of people who comprise your target audience. To know who they are and gain their attention, Ogilvy recommends you perform extensive R&D.

The mere sound of it is exhausting, but it’s much simpler if you formulate a plan and follow it step-by-step.

3. “Your role is to sell, don’t distract yourself from the sole purpose of advertising.”

We live in an era where businesses are driven by aggressive marketing. Competition is tough and it’s survival of the fittest.

What they don’t realize is that by focusing all their energies into being creative and one-upping their competition, they are letting go of the sole purpose of advertising — Selling their product/service.

This doesn’t mean that you have to take a step back the creativity.

4.”The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.”

Value your customers and don’t take them for granted.

Audiences these days are more informed than ever (all hail the internet) and so, the shortcuts taken by you to lure them into buying your product or service will in time, backfire.

Treat your target audience as equals — educate and inform them.

This doesn’t mean you need to post a flurry of words in your ad, but rather information that provides substantial evidence about why the product does what you say it does. It need not necessarily be product details, but features that provide more meaningful insights into consumer problems.

In a nutshell, answer the – Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.

5.”Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.”

Talk to your audience using everyday phrases — conversational language that you would use with a friend, a family member, a relative, a co-worker or an acquaintance. In the appropriate context of course.

Ogilvy suggests communicating with them effectively by following the KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) principle. Avoid pretentious buzzwords, inflated jargon, and all phrases that beat around the bush.

It is one thing to be creative and play with words and another to use lofty language. The former can make your target audience curious, the latter may annoy them to no end.

Take a cue from this print ad by Fanta, which is both educative and informative and gets the point across.

P.S. It is also interesting to note the remarkable use of typography.

6.“Write great headlines and you’ll have successfully invested 80% of your money.”

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have come across the much-used phrase, ‘content is king’. But I kid you not, there are over 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails and 864 hours of video content created on a daily basis.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are types of other content including micro-blog posts, images, video, and long-form. This over-abundance of content inevitably leads to saturation.