Having researched the existing state of affairs in advertising and marketing within the industry for the past few months I have been entirely under-whelmed. And it’s not just me owners and managers have been living with the diminishing return on marketing investment for some time.
One of the marketing approaches that we have employed with a lot of our iPOS advertising is resonance. It’s not something that is used a lot in advertising generally, some estimate less than 10% of consumer products ads use resonance.
What is resonance advertising? According to Edward F McQuarrie. “Resonance occurs when there is a repetition of elements within an ad, and when this redundancy is such that an exchange, condensation, or multiplication of meaning occurs… resonance opens up the meaning of an advertisement. Resonance is a device for generating ambiguity and paradox… the use of resonance moves the advertisement in the direction of poetry rendering the meaning open rather than closed.”
What does all that mean? It’s a bit technical but basically, resonance advertising uses puns, metaphors, and other kinds of wordplay combined with an image to create a double meaning.
Here is an example from one of our iPOS advertising campaigns. This ad would appear in a hair dressing salon, day spa, or ladies wear store… where shoppers (mostly ladies in this case) are concerned with looking good or feeling good about themselves.
The rationale is simple… a woman who goes to the hair dressers, for example, to look good and feel better about herself might be happy with her new hairstyle but having spent 40 minutes looking at her double chin or flabby arms in the mirror might be motivated to improve her “look” a little more with a trial membership to your health club. And compared to the price of her cut and colour ($100 plus) the thirty dollars for this trial offer actually seems like great value… which of course it is.
The headline “look good from top to bottom” suggests to the customer… sure your hair looks good (top) but what about your butt (bottom)? I’m told that women tend to spend quite a bit of time thinking about their butts.
The double meaning here: looking good from head to toe… but what about your butt? The ad takes them from thinking hair and makeup to body image issues and immediately presents an irresistible offer.
Resonance advertising engages the customer more because they see something that they already believe (I’m in a hair dressers, of course I want to look good) and then flips the meaning in another direction… nice hair is one thing but what about your butt… flabby arms… double chin… are you willing to invest to improve them?
I’ll run a few more of these tutorials for our first-movers to get a feel for putting these kinds of ads together. In fact, we have hundreds of ads like this one that we’ll be making available for our first-movers over the next couple of months along with significant updates for version 1.x of our iPOS report.
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