Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
John Wanamaker, (attributed)
US department store merchant (1838 – 1922)
It’s every marketing manager’s dream to have big budgets. Big budgets allow them to do exciting stuff like advertising, public relations, direct mail, sponsorships and events so as to convince their targets to choose their brands. Nowadays there is another tool in great use: the online space is being used to woo “customers”, especially the younger demos, through tools such as facebook, blogs and e-mail blasts.
The People’s Partnership and the PNM, it would seem, both had a bottomless pit of ad money. But the best pepper sauce in the world cannot save a lousy pelau or crab and dumplin or curry, just like great advertising can’t save a bad product. So we might ask did the PNM’s product have defects? And did we witness the equivalent of a product recall with people opting for a political vehicle that they deemed to be safer?
Whatever the effectiveness of their respective advertising, we know that a lot of it, on both sides, was wasted. Hopefully T&T will get the campaign financing reform that it so desperately needs. Then people won’t be so free with money that a country, especially one as tiny as ours, needs to invest in other priority areas.
And even if we don’t know what’s working, the answer is not to go on an ad spending spree. We need to have more faith in our brand (product) or to realise that super high ad frequency does not trump poor product quality; rather it highlights it.
