Tip Of The Day - 1/24/06 - Advertising Makes World Go Round

[Sean Adams]

Advertising Makes the World Go Around
by Derek Miller


Have you ever thought of this? Every business in the Fortune 500 list of companies started out as a small business. Let’s take one of the biggest, Microsoft, which currently enjoys revenues of $36.84 billion dollars per year. This is an income in excess of most nations of the world. Microsoft started only 30 years ago, when Bill Gates left Harvard in his junior year to start the corporation. His dream was that desk top computers would be available for every office and home, and what’s more there would be easy to use software to fuel this revolution and bring it within the grasp of most people the world over. This is indeed what he and he Microsoft Corporation have achieved, so much so that he and his wife, Melinda, have been voted amongst Time Magazine’s top personalities of the year 2005. That indeed is a success story!
You can offer the best product or professional service on the entire planet, and yet if nobody has heard of whatever it you have brought to the market place, then nobody is going to buy whatever it is you have to sell. True, a few people, maybe your friends and family know about your successful venture and gradually word will spread, but that is a long and time consuming process which will probably see you, like many small businesses go out of business!
To be successful you need to get the word out to people who would be interested in buying your product or using your service. This is what marketing is all about and the key to marketing is advertising. Good advertising is an accomplished skill. Let’s face it twenty year ago, very few people drank bottled water. Today, wherever you go in the world you will see the ubiquitous plastic bottles on shop counters or clutched like fashion assessories as somebody walks down the street. This revolution has meant that something that flows out of your kitchen tap at relatively low or no cost to yourself has now become a huge international business. How can this be? Very simply the huge growth in bottled water sales is due to good marketing and brilliant advertising.

Remember, too, that it was the Coca-Cola Corporation that turned Santa Claus into a bewhiskered, jovial old cove dressed in red. Prior to1929 Santa Claus was to be seen garbed in green, but when Coca-Cola marketing department gave him a make over he appeared in the same shade of red as that of the Company itself. Now, that changed the thinking of children and not forgetting adults through the ensuing decades. Of course Coke sales benefited enormously as a result of a mind altering advertising program. Isn’t it time you thought of how to get your message out effectively?