THE COCAINE OF ADVERTISING

by Roy Williams

Ask your physician how to feel good, and he'll look you squarely in the eye and say, "Eat right and exercise." Yet for every dollar spent in fitness centers, Americans spend nineteen dollars on cocaine. The reason? Two seconds after you snort cocaine you feel like Superman. Two weeks of diet and exercise just makes you hungry and sore.

The desire for instant gratification in harmless enough if the only thing it leads you to do is pay higher prices at a convenience store. But heaven help you if you demand instant gratification from your advertising! The business person looking for a financial quick fix will soon discover the cocaine of advertising, a four-letter magic chant:

SALE! SALE! SALE! SALE!

Good advertising is painful at first because you don't see immediate results. The impatient business owner will usually snort a little ad cocaine and then get defensive about it: "How can this be bad for me? I've never done better!" But just as the junkie never stops to consider how the drug is destroying his physical health, the business owner never stops to consider how "Sale! Sale! Sale!" undermines his business health. The first dose of cocaine makes him feel great. So does the next one, and the next, and the next -- though it takes larger and larger doses to get the same effect. Therefore, it's almost impossible to convince the addict he has a problem, even though he started with only "Twenty Percent Off" and has now progressed to "Half Price."

Successful companies don't spend their ad dollars training their customers to wait for a sale. Do you?