Marketing isn’t a picnic. It may have been at one point in history, when anyone who had the budget to produce a TV commercial could essentially write a check for 3 times that amount in sales.
That era evaporated quickly. Today, TV commercials are the norm and it takes an extremely cunning combination of entertainment, information, and a call to action to get consumers excited about your product.
Then, for an equally brief amount of time, the Internet was the new easy path to riches for a business.
People were taking advantage of Search Engines giving people instant access to their products for almost no cost and the Internet marketing craze was born.
Those days too are pretty much over.
If you’re marketing on the web these days, you’re in an increasingly crowded market no matter what your niche and you still have to fall back on the basics of good salesmanship.
But there’s a niche that’s been difficult to market since the late 40’s when the government really started cracking down- dietary supplements and health products.
The FDA recently smacked General Mills with a warning letter. General Mills has been ordered to stop telling people that Cheerios can lower cholesterol.
Why?
Because lowering cholesterol is something that drugs do. If you want to lower your cholesterol you should be buying pharmaceutical drugs (Statins).
That means if General Mills wants to keep telling consumers that Cheerios lower cholesterol, they need to have their cereal FDA approved and produced as a prescription drug.
But Cheerios really can lower your cholesterol!
Doesn’t matter. The FDA and their buddies in big pharma aren’t getting any money from Cheerios so they can’t tell people. The dozens of clinical trials and thousands of people who have actually lowered their cholesterol don’t matter.
Hard scientific proof is inconsequential. General Mills can’t tell people about a great benefit of their otherwise boring cereal.
Here’s where I get to sound like a cranky old man…
The Natural Health Industry Has Been Fighting This For Years!
I write for a doctor with a stellar line of natural health products. But in writing his copy, I’m not allowed to tell people how well his products work.
I’m not even allowed to use testimonials with other people describing exactly how his products worked 5x better than their Statin drugs and without the side effects, or that one device completely removes the need for Carpal Tunnel Surgery.
It’s all true… and completely illegal to say.
Marketing when you can’t tell people the absolute truth is always a challenge.
But fortunately for most people, it doesn’t carry over into many other markets. In the health market, we’ve figured out ways to convey the image of what a product does without actually telling people.
Then when they get it and it works, you get the most adoring, glowing testimonials… which of course you can’t use in your marketing without some heavy editing. They still feel good.
But if you’re not in the natural health market, chances are you can tell people exactly what your product does. In fact, if your product will improve someone’s life, it’s important to tell.
When you play down the benefits out of a sense of modesty, your doing yourself but more importantly your customer a disservice.
Cheerios probably isn’t going to be hurt much by the FDA letter. But that’s only because for years they were allowed to tell people what their cereal could do for them and many people’s quality of life was improved because of it. That legacy, based on truth and science, will live on even without the advertising push.
The most basic of successful advertising principals is to tell the absolute truth. It makes the most money in the long run and allows you to sleep soundly at night.
So how are you doing at telling it?
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