A Better Mousetrap

The greater the barrage of ads that people are exposed to, the more adept they get at filtering out what they aren’t interested in. Strangely, we in the advertising and marketing business continue to do more of the same. The latest ad may be more creative than last year’s, but viewer’s ennui with our collective output still outstrips the incremental creativity.

Over the last few years it’s become commonplace to take product parity for granted and hence depend on created communication to be the differentiator. This in turn makes the advertising try harder than ever to stretch the metaphors, sometimes leading to the ridiculous; I mean, a soap will not exactly make India a better place. This trend reminds me of the consumer who once said when you sell a shoe, sell a shoe and don’t sing the national anthem while you are at it. Given all this I wonder if sooner rather than later, we will we go back to the times when companies actually attempted to deliver superior products vis-à-vis competition? Will be very long before a marketer actually decides to reduce investments in communication and invest more in simply designing better products – from delivery to packaging to experiences. We see a lot of that already in technology brands, some of whom have become cult. So why not shoes or soap?