Robert Lauterborn’s Advertising Brilliance
- Posted by Jim Tobin on December 12th, 2007
filed in Advertising, The Business of Advertising |
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Here’s a great quote:
The advertising person’s role on any side of the business is to help a company understand its customers and their needs better; to help a company respond to and speak to those needs, efficiently and effectively. Advertising is an honest business, a noble business, the engine of the American economy.-Bob Lauterborn
Lauterborn, James L. Knight Professor of Advertising a the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, can take a complex concept and condense it to its most brilliant and concise truthfulness. Really, the guy creates intellectual diamonds.
So what does that quote mean to us in the advertising business? Simply said, everything in advertising starts with the customer, involves the customer and ends with the customer. The minute advertising becomes “to” the customer instead of “about” the customer, it begins to be a waste of time and money.
Look at the best advertising: it tell the customer more about THEMSELF than the PRODUCT. Every aspect of the message addresses the customer and the customer’s need.
When you see an advertisement that you don’t get, know that you are NOT SUPPOSED to get it. It isn’t about you and it isn’t for you. And then try to figure out how you happened to see the message… are you a 60-something watching MTV?
“Know thy customer” is worth repeating. And Bob Lauterborn explains why so well.