In response to my “Age of Insight” email yesterday, Australia’s best and favorite copywriter, Daniel Throssell, writes to ask:
I love how you think about this.
But aren’t your three levels of marketing kinda just expressions of market sophistication — and the different techniques required to make an ad succeed at each level?
You’ve probably heard about market sophistication. It’s an idea from Gene Schwartz’s book Breakthrough Advertising.
Basically, sophistication is a question of how many ads people in your market have seen previously. The more ads, the more sophisticated — and you gotta act accordingly.
At first, a simple promise will do. Then you need a bigger promise. Then you need a mechanism. Then you need a cooler mechanism.
And eventually, people get soooo bored with all your promises and mechanisms. You’re in the last stage of sophistication.
So Daniel is asking whether my “ages of marketing” — the Age of Promise, the Age of Positioning, the Age of Insight — are just a restatement of Gene’s stages of sophistication?
And is insight just another concept that’s hidden between the densely written lines of Breakthrough Advertising?
As often, my answer is both yes and no.
Yes — because pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising. This includes examples of proto-insight and insight-like techniques.
And no — because while pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising, there is one thing missing.
As far as I understand, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets. The way Gene has it, when a market reaches the ultimate level of sophistication, it eventually dies, and a new market is born out it:
The market for cigarettes dies, but the market for filter cigarettes is born, like a phoenix rising out of the ashtray.
And then the market for filter cigs goes through the same stages of sophistication, from naive to jaded, as the cigarette market went through.
Eventually, the market for filter cigarettes also dies, and yet another new market — the market for flavor in cigarettes — opens up. “Winston tastes like a cigarette should.”
Sounds reasonable, right? Human desires and gullibility are infinite, right?
Well, about that. That’s the one thing that’s missing from Gene’s magnificent Breakthrough Advertising.
Like I said, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets.
But it doesn’t account for what happens to both society and to individuals after many such deaths and rebirths.
So what happens? What happens after decades of advertising, after thousands or millions of our personal money spent on cars, cigarettes, detergents, copywriting courses, and book-of-the-month clubs — all of which failed to really deliver on the deepest promises we were hoping they would fulfill?
I’ll tell you.
What happens is that more and more people become guarded against any kind of advertising — not just bored with the claims in a given market.
What happens is low self-esteem — people start to suspect that there’s something wrong with them, and that even the most credible and amazing new offer can’t help them.
What happens is compulsive aimlessness — as is endemic in the info publishing world — where people still buy on occasion, but they never consume or implement.
That’s when you enter the Age of Insight. And that’s when insight techniques become useful beyond the techniques that Gene talks about in Breakthrough Advertising.
All that’s not to say that promises or mechanisms or positioning are obsolete. You can still sell and influence using just those.
But as Gene says, it’s a matter of statistics. And today, more and more people are becoming jaded, defeatist, or simply indifferent in response to classic advertising and marketing methods.
The good news is that it is possible to reach them — and to open up vast new markets for your offers.
How do you do it? That’s something I talk about on occasion in my daily email newsletter. In case you’d like to read that, and maybe find out how to reach those unreachable people, click here and sign up to get my dailiy emails.