If you want your business to fail, don’t buy any advertising. Somewhere, a bankruptcy lawyer is waiting to thank you for putting money in his pocket.
I edited a retail automobile parts catalog during the last recession before the Great Recession. Even so, business was good at our company, Studebaker International.
We were originally located in Long Beach, but later relocated to Indiana. My boss Ed Reynolds told me that during the recession before that, he saw his business grow 50 percent in one year. His secret: he kept advertising; his competitors stopped.
I can’t say I broke new ground in catalog editing. My boss had the vision. I just made his vision reality. We made things as easy as possible on our customers—our biggest competitor made things, ahem, challenging for their customers. Last I heard, my former boss bought them out.
I can say that my annual catalog generated about 75 percent of our annual revenue.
The rest came from word of mouth, a newsletter, monthly magazine ads, a Christmas mini-catalog and the boss’s appearances at the odd car show.
I think we were the subject of one newspaper article and it did generate sales for a little while, but free publicity fades if you can’t sustain the media attention. In the end, the only way to ensure media attention is to buy an ad—and to remember you only control the space you pay for.
Paying to advertise is good for business. It’s an investment.
My boss, my co-workers and I lived on the money that the business generated. If my ads had failed, I would have been fired and the others would have starved.
I mention this so you’ll understand that while I am now a journalist, I have some small knowledge of the subject of advertising. When economies go south, advertisers usually cut back on advertising.
That’s what Studebaker International’s competitors did. Some of them went broke because of the false economy of cutting advertising expenses. We got the business they threw away because we continued advertising.
I must confess I’ve never understood how people can be so foolish.
Advertising is simply a sales pitch. It’s an indirect sales pitch because the pitch is made by the advertisement rather than a salesman, but it’s a sales pitch all the same.
Cutting advertising is like saying, “Well, if the customers won’t come to me, I won’t go to them either.”
That’s a great way to go broke, but not a good way to make money.
You sell by making a sales pitch. You go knocking on doors or you buy advertising space in as many places as you can.
I know some people think the Internet is the only way to go. That’s “magic bullet” thinking. Magic bullets can kill your business if you believe in them. There is no magic. There’s only hard work, period.
I know some people who only advertise online or only advertise on bus benches.
I say advertise in as many places as you can as frequently as you can. Put your ad where you think customers are likely to look for them, say near a popular feature in your local paper.
And don’t count on free publicity.
Now I’m quite obviously biased in favor of the Sun. We have a print edition as well as an online presence. But advertise. Because you can’t make a sale without making a sales pitch.
Charles M. Kelly is assistant editor of the Sun Newspapers.
