Sky+ adverts provide great example of my advice
Have you seen or heard the current advertising campaign by BSkyB to promote the Sky+ personal video recorder? It includes TV ads that feature celebrities including Michael Parkinson, David Gower, Felicity Kendal, Ross Kemp and Mariella Frostrup talking about the benefits of Sky+. I have also seen poster adverts that include simple quotes from the same celebrities highlighting how beneficial they find the Sky+ facility.
On my way home the other evening after travelling to Cornwall to present a full afternoon talk about How to make more profits from your smaller clients I saw one of the ads and realised that they reinforce one of the points I highlight towards the end of the talk. It’s also a subject about which I have posted extensively on this blog in the past. The power and importance of Testimonials.
Rather than repeat myself let me simply refer you back to these 5 earlier posts from last year:
The value of testimonials (part one)
Client testimonials: Why they are important (part two)
Client testimonials: How to get them (part three)
Client testimonials: Which ones to use? (part four)
Client testimonials: A key mistake to avoid (part five)
To my mind the adverts for Sky+ are very effective. And vastly more so than would be anything written by BSkyB or a conventional advert. The key point is that most advertising contains mere assertions by the provider/supplier and mere assertions are rarely compelling.
If you are a regular reader of this blog you will have seen previous cross references to my Tax Advice Network website. Let’s assume you have yet to go and have a look. Here’s a couple of genuine testimonials copied from our promotional leaflet:
“I will certainly be using Tax Advice Network again – it’s just what small practitioners have been waiting for!” – Geoff Booth, Tax Savers Direct
“Many thanks for your brilliant emails. This is now the only newsletter I read regularly and I pass it to my staff” – Ray Baxter, Baxter Associates
And they are probably far more compelling than anything I could write myself.
Don’t you agree?
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I should stress that ‘real’ testimonials – as referred to in my earlier posts are EVEN more powerful. BSkyB has almost certainly paid the celebrities for their endorsements. Whilst we trust them to be telling the truth the fact that they were paid to do so slightly undermines the value of their testimonials. Not so with the ones we typically collect in business.