How to Avoid Getting Snookered by Email Marketing

You are a business manager that wants to stay up on marketing, so you get an email message that says:

MarketingProfs.com will EXPLODE your marketing know-how with SECRETS only we can provide. Our articles, written by world famous, best-selling authors and consultants for the world's top companies can show you the way to MAKE MILLIONS. Get our incredible marketing tip-sheet, and use our secret principles on your site. Our bleeding edge know-how can bring you success beyond your wildest dreams. Get a hit counter and you'll go dizzy watching it spin as customers flock to your site.

Sound enticing? Well, it's designed to be. The problem is that you may be reading into these ads and inferring that the companies that write them deliver more than what they actually claim. Advertisers have long been aware of a number of devious little tactics that make us believe what we want to hear while still letting them keep their noses clean (e.g., not engaging in outright deception). In fact, you might do this yourself, but if you're personally not interested in being deceived (especially when you're a buyer) then you need to be aware of how these tactics work -- else you'll risk getting snookered by advertising.

PUFFERY

Consumer advertisers are well known for using such words as "delicious", "super", "long lasting", "smoother", "softer" and "healthier" as product claims. Are such claims true? Well, whether they are true or not is really a matter of opinion. What is delicious to me may taste terrible to you, and whether a product lasts a short or a long time really depends on what my definition of "long" is-which may be different from yours.

The government calls this "puffery" and it is legal because they assume that consumers can tell the difference between fact and opinion (although whether they can is a matter of debate). In the above ad, most of the words are pure puffery. "Make Millions", "Secrets" and "bleeding edge" are all words that are highly suspect. Can you verify that people who use our site have, in fact, made millions? If we had testimonials, are they credible?

Notice the words "best selling". These are puff words. In what sense are they best selling? Best selling among The New York Times, Business Week, or Timbuktu Daily News? If they are really "best selling" in the sense of being bought by large numbers of people, are they well ranked on respected and verifiable indices like Amazon or Business Week?

And frankly, what's with this word we see all the time…SECRETS. "Secrets revealed." These revealed secrets are often just the same old stuff you can find for free, and if they were so important why are so many secrets so casually revealed. Of course, this type of puffery is playing on your hopes (to learn more about how marketers sell hope, see our article titled 'Selling Hope').

IT'S ALL AROUND YOU

Just think about how many other examples of puffery you see on a day-to-day basis. Think about all of the consulting companies that claim to have internationally acclaimed experts, marketing gurus, and renowned business authors. Are they really wonderful and well known? Maybe not. It's all a matter of opinion and whom you know. Or consider companies that claim to help you "explode your sales". What's an explosion to one may not be an explosion to another. Or those who use breakthrough" technology. Finally, of course, is the most overused word "leading", as in "the leading online blah, blah, blah…" Puffery? Most likely.

In fact there are so many words used that are puffery that we can only begin to scratch the surface here (we'll continue this series in a future article). For example, 'sale' is another form of puffery. Why? The term sale implies that goods are temporarily set at a low price. However, some companies can have "sales" on all the time. As such, their sale price is actually their regular price.

Another form of puffery is the phrase biggest sale ever. Whether a sale is big or not really depends on how many sales you have seen for a given product category in the past.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Well, if you're selling something you can use what we said to try and fool customers. Oftentimes they will buy it because they're gullible and/or want to believe. Of course, you can also just be straightforward with customers, but the choice is yours.

If, however, you're a customer, as in the first example, you might begin by recognizing when someone is using puffery on you and check out their credentials, references and everything else to protect yourself.

Remember, we've just been talking about the most glaring forms of puffery. In fact, many more subtle tactics are commonly used by marketers to take in consumers. An article in our next newsletter will describe a number of these tactics, including the use of 'stealth words', incomplete comparisons, implied superiority and invented words. Stay tuned, and learn more about how you can avoid being snookered by advertising.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Deborah J. MacInnis is the Charles L. and Ramona I. Hilliard Professor of Business Administration at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, and a co-author of Brand Admiration: Build a Business People Love. She has consulted with companies and the government in the areas of consumer behavior and branding. She is theory development editor at the Journal of Marketing, and former co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. Professor MacInnis has served as president of the Association for Consumer Research and vice-president of conferences and research for the American Marketing Association's Academic Council. She has received the Journal of Marketing's Alpha Kappa Psi and Maynard awards for the papers that make the greatest contribution to marketing thought. She is the co-author of a leading textbook on consumer behavior and is co-editor of several edited volumes on branding.

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