Rule 27

Guerrilla Marketing

How many times must a prospect see a marketing message to take them from a state of total apathy to purchase readiness? Following a yearlong study, the researchers concluded that a marketing message must penetrate the mind of a prospect a total of nine times before that prospect becomes a customer.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that for every three times you expose your prospect to your marketing message ­ via ad, sign, monthly direct mail advertising, whatever ­ it gets missed or ignored two of those times. After all, people have more important things to do than pay attention to your marketing. So you’ve got to put out the good word about your company a total of 27 times in order to make those nine impressions.

If you interpret that as meaning you might energetically market your product 26 times with a possibility of zero results, your interpretation is a good one, albeit depressing.

For example, if your primary marketing takes the form of newspaper advertising, and you run a good ad once a week in a newspaper ­ here’s how it generally works in real life for a new business that has done no marketing:

The first time: The first time your prospect sees your ad, he doesn’t really think about it much. (This assumes your prospect is a he, but the reality is the same for a she.) Your message barely registers, but does get noticed. You’ve run it three times, but he’s noticed it just once.

The second time: Now you’ve run your ad six times and your prospect is noticing it for the second time. He may read the headline and look at the visual, possibly even read the copy. But all that generally happens is that he thinks he may have seen that ad before. That’s about it.

The third time: You’ve put out good money to run your ad nine times in a little over two months. But sales aren’t soaring. Customers aren’t pouring through the door or those tiny holes in your telephone receiver. What’s happening? What’s happening is that your prospect is seeing your ad for the third time and thinking he’s pretty darned sure he’s heard of you somewhere sometime, but another headline on the page grabs his attention away from your ad.

The fourth time: Now, you’ve run your advertising a full 12 weeks. Twelve ads you’ve paid for and your prospect has seen only four of them. Your prospect knows now that he’s seen your ads before, and he figures that you must be offering something of value or else you wouldn’t keep on advertising it. (Although people tend to believe that success breeds frequent advertising, it’s interesting to note that just the reverse is true.)

The fifth time: With your budget to the grindstone, you keep running those ads to those same people in those same media and your accountant still has no good news for you. The accountant wonders why you’re putting all those bucks into 15 ads without seeing tangible results. You wonder the same thing. But, at the same time, your prospect is beginning to feel a sense of familiarity with you. He’s thinking of whether or not he needs what you offer. Maybe he should check you out someday. Yes, he’ll do that.

The sixth time: Now, your prospect feels a sense of solidity about you. He’s seen your ad six times over quite a long period ­ about a year, he figures, though it’s only been about four or five months. He begins to think about how he can possibly buy what you’re selling. Meanwhile, you’ve run your ads for 18 weeks, and there’s no real sign that they’ve taken hold yet.

At this point, most business owners figure they’ve been going about their marketing the wrong way. Maybe they shouldn’t be running ads. Maybe the ads should have said different things. Maybe the ads should have run in different publications. Maybe the artwork was bad. So they decide to pull their ads ­ to stop advertising and look into something different.

Red light emergency! We can’t let them do that! We can’t let them stop their ads just when they’re beginning to take effect. Can’t they see that the ads are about to work? No, they can’t see that at all. So they really do make a major and ill-advised change in their marketing, possibly eliminating all their advertising in the process.

This is the norm. This is the way it really happens, the down-and-dirty facts of life. The prospect is getting warmer and warmer about buying, but the advertiser is not seeing results. So the process comes to a grinding halt. I call this “sellus interruptus.” The sale is never consummated. But consummation takes place when the advertising is allowed to run, as you will see.

The seventh time: You have waited 21 weeks now, five whole months ­ and the advertising for which you have paid so dearly is not yet paying for itself, let alone paying for anything. Are you discouraged? You bet your bankbook you are! Who wouldn’t be after 21 weeks of unanswered ads? Well, for one, the prospect isn’t. Right now he’s figuring out a time that he can own what you’re offering. He’s figuring how to pay for it, where to put it, even thinking about the benefits of ownership ­ the ones you kept reminding him of in your ads.

The eighth time: Well, you might sense a glimmering that the marketing is working by now. But it’s not working that well. After writing checks for 24 weeks of advertising, you expected something more than a faint glimmer. Meanwhile, your prospect has it all figured out now ­ where, when, how, and why to buy what you’ve been offering. He feels good about you, feels he can count on you because you’ve been a constant presence in the media, because you’ve maintained a clear identity, and because he keeps reading about your company. Beware, for at this point, some business owners stop advertising. They just can’t rationalize pouring any more money into something that’s not working. So they just quit the media, quit advertising, break off all those budding relationships with new prospects. Those prospects, seeing the sudden end of advertising, have their confidence shaken, and decide to wait before making their purchase.

The ninth time: Cue to heavenly music. This is the time for people who love happy endings. The business owners who hung in there are delighted but not shocked when they see tangible proof of advertising’s efficacy. Increasing numbers of prospects, people who were once totally apathetic to the business, knowing and thinking nothing about it, are now customers ­ real-life paying customers ­ and if you go about it right, repeat customers, the life force of a profitable business.

It took 27 ads to get through to these people. Nine times. They had to see your message nine times to gain, then sustain a desire to buy and own what you sell. Few business owners are willing to pay dues that high, wait periods that long, take nourishment from hope that elusive. But those who are willing to bear up under the pain of lethargic sales curve gain the benefits of a valuable and rare personality trait: patience.

The first personality trait of the successful guerrilla is patience.

Of the five traits, if patience isn’t the most important, that at least it’s tied for first. What it’s tied with may not be a word you like to use to describe yourself, but it’s a personality trait you’re required to develop if you’re to launch a successful attack.

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