Sea Crest Health Care Center

One of the first rules of marketing and advertising is to understand and target the audience your product is intended to reach.  Seems pretty straightforward, but sometimes the path to the promised land, or targeted audience, is a winding one.

If you are a Mad Men fan, you watched this week as two advertisers debated how best to sell Pond’s Cold Cream.  Although the client said they were interested in appealing to younger women the veteran ad guy wanted to use “dames” from the movies in their ads – Barbara Stanwyck or someone similar – utilizing the argument that young women look up to older women.  His backup plan was to promise that either a) Girls who used Pond’s would land a husband or b) Girls who didn’t wouldn’t.

The female copywriter felt strongly that he was on the wrong track.  I would have to agree.

Clearly things were a little different in the early 60s because these days, we are constantly presented with images of barely-adult girls showing us how wrinkle free, flat bellied and fabulous we could be if we only used the latest greatest youth elixir.

Or, maybe they are wrinkle free and fabulous because they are 17.  Just saying.

So do younger women want to be older? Or do older women want to be younger?

The answer is both and neither.

Younger women want to revel in their youth, even while they look forward to their adulthood.  They want more responsibility – but only the responsibilities they want.  They want to be taken seriously, but not too seriously.

Older woman look back fondly on their youth, but most don’t want to go back there.  Wouldn’t go back there on a bet.  They want to look like they did when they were younger, but keep all of the knowledge and experience they have gained along the way.  They love the richness of what they have experienced, but want to remember (at least sort of) what it was like to be wide-eyed and ready to take on the world.

They want similar things, but they want them in entirely different ways.

I recently read this fascinating article that talked about how assuming that 50 year-olds want to be 30 year-olds is a huge mistake.  Many of us may want to look and feel like 30 year-olds.  But we don’t particularly want to act or think like them.

One of my friends jokes with her 4-year-old daughter she is going to trade her in for two 2-year-olds.  Targeting 25 year-olds to appeal to 50 year-olds makes just about the same amount of sense.

The best way to reach either of these audiences is to reinforce what is great about how they are right now and how your product can make the most of that.  Don’t assume that one group aspires to be the other and that a single message will reach both.

by Ruth Folger Weiss

“Aha!” :  all those Eureka moments I’ve come to count on as a creative professional in the advertising and marketing field, were really instances of insight reflective  of an active mind with some serious neuron brain activity. And though the classically cerebral thought processes of my so analytical spouse are  more often associated with “smarts”, researchers mapping the anatomy of the brain’s breakthrough moments reveal that insight is crucial to intellect.

Epiphanies that lead to bursts of mental clarity are often so physical because of the intense activation of alternating electrical currents- that have lead to monumental breakthroughs and revelations  in the sciences. Think Einstein imagining trains and lightning when the idea of special relativity hit him like a bolt of lightning. Sir Isaac Newton, lolling in his orchard, espies universal gravitation. And perhaps the one most readily identified with: Archimedes taking his bath came upon his formula calculating density and volume- and, as legend would have us believe, emerged from the tub, exclaiming: “Eureka! I’ve got it!

Daydreaming, scientists have found, is often the brain hard at work; MRI scans indicate intense activation in problem solving areas. Patterns of high frequency neural activity in the right frontal cortex are easily manifested right before an answer to a problem dawns upon the person!

Sudden insights are the fusion of  a complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning!

A  person’s frame of mind influences whether she has a Eureka moment.

Your state of mind affects your inclination to insightful thinking.

Your positive mood impacts your likelihood to experience insight.

Which leads me to my exit, as I anticipate the drawing of a luxurious bath… and some brilliant flashes of insight…

Love it when the  different passions of my life converge and… beg for a creative solution.

Fashion, the Health Care Universe and Marketing all came together in Lucette Lagnado’s article in The Wall St. Journal. So Doctors and Hospitals still haven’t whipped up an all-encompassing solution to the dressing gown we all love to hate… Aside from making me smile, I’m gonna whip Ad Lib Unlimited’s   designers into a designing frenzy to come up with a sharp “cover-up” that should cover all bases.

Read full article at WSJ.com.

The challenge to manage corporate communications via social media in a responsible manner keeps getter tougher. Just when you thought you could leave Twitter to others who had the time to engage in mindless solipsism, you see an article in The Wall St. Journal: Corporate Blogs and “Tweets” Must Keep SEC in Mind.
The redoubtable business source underlines the immersion of Twitter into the Corporate zeitgeist by unequivocally stating: “Social Media Offer Immediacy and Spontaneity to Communications but Risk Running Afoul of Regulations.

Eighty-one Fortune 500 companies sponsor public blogs, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chevron Corp. and General Motors Corp., according to the Society for New Communications Research. Of those blogs, 23 link to corporate Twitter accounts.

On Thursday, a Johnson & Johnson executive reported for the first time on the health-care giant’s annual meeting via Twitter, which allows users to post “tweets” of as many as 140 characters from devices with Internet access.

A Who’s Who of Corporate Twitterers include:

Best Buy
Safeway
Cisco Systems
Toys ‘R’ Us
Dell
Johnson & Johnson
Wells Fargo
Microsoft
Time Warner
FedEx
New York Life Insurance
McDonald’s
Oracle
Google
Avnet
Amazon.com
CBS
Texas Instruments
EMC
Monsanto
Whole Foods Market
Newell Rubbermaid
Symantec

A whole new lexicon and legalese is emerging to deal with the new reality, and perils, of this new social media.

No, Twitter is no longer the purview of teenagers sharing what block they’re on or movie they’re seeing. Now, we’re advised to ignore it at our own peril.