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Is what you see what you get?

July 14, 2005 By Joe Rawlinson

My wife and I pulled up to a Sonic drive-in for dinner the other day. She had seen the commercials for the mini banana split and that prompted us to pull over when we saw the Sonic. The big menu had a huge beautiful picture of the 99 cent banana split. After getting our food we were very surprised to see the great disparity between the picture and our desserts. We had half melted ice cream and the whole container was small enough to fit in our palm of my hand. When compared with our expectations, the item we ordered didn’t match the picture and was too small!

Product Descriptions

The words describing a product should accurately reflect reality. The tendency in marketing is to make something sound greater than the actual product. This works well for selling the product for the first time. However, if the customer finds the product or service to be vastly different from what was advertised, they will not return.

Product Imagery

A picture is worth a thousand words. We see glossy pictures of products everywhere. These are often doctored after the photo shoot or feature perfect specimens. Rarely, does the delivered product match the high standards of the sales poster. With photography, the customer has an image of the product already in mind when the product arrives. This creates immediate and obvious problems when there isn’t a match.

Take the Test

Take a fresh look at your marketing copy. Next, look over your product brochures and product images. Now, go look at your actual product. Do they match? When you look at your product do you start to laugh? Does it pale in comparison to what you previously saw and read? If so, you need to do one of two things:

  • Change your advertising and marketing content to match your real product
  • Improve your product and bring it up the high quality described and shown in your marketing materials

Both are tough to do but are well worth the effort. I’d vote for the latter. If your product or service was as wonderful as that glossy ad shows, you’ll have customers coming back in no time.

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