Comment: Retail can cash in on the feel-good factor with TV advertising

No comments

I bought shares in Sainsbury’s, Next and Marks & Spencer last month, tangibly supporting my conviction.

I bought shares in Sainsbury’s, Next and Marks & Spencer last month, tangibly supporting my conviction that retailers will be among the biggest winners from the undoubted and growing improvement in our economic environment.

No crystal ball or tea leaves needed. Consistent, positive statistical indicators, obvious to all who have no contrary case to prove, are supported by an intuitive feel of consumer confidence, built over a lifetime in retail. These, and the likely pre-general election uplift, all leave me certain of this good news trend.

I am being asked with increasing regularity (always a good sign) the totally bananas question “does advertising work?” Well, directing the £100m annual DFS advertising spend over 40-plus years, much on television, has definitely given me an inkling.

Do we consider Wonga, Viking River Cruises, Oak Furniture Land, and all those insurers of your pet, home, travel or car as mad as meerkats as they kick and scream for programme sponsorship and wrestle for prime time TV spots, competing with Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble and a host of other blue chip companies? If not, then all that repetitive TV spend must be a bit of a guide.

If your business benefits from the generation of volume, and scale drives big economies, it definitely pays to advertise - and television with the right message is still ‘the daddy’ of all media.

So in response to the naive and bonkers question of “does TV advertising work?” the answer is a resounding “yes, it certainly can”.

And I would add you simply cannot invest too much in that munificent fairy godmother, telly. A gospel I have lived by and now live on handsomely as a grateful beneficiary of the results of enacting the ‘it pays to advertise’ belief.

Advertising is not some indulgent expenditure to raise the corporate profile or win awards. Advertising is an investment, no different from my M&S, Next and Sainsbury’s shareholdings, intended to generate a mega-return.

Nobody had heard of Nick Clegg three years or so ago, until a bit of airtime with Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Now Nicholas is in charge of the Government when Dave is on holiday.

Dynamic and powerful as advertising can be, clearly it cannot make up for a rubbish concept poorly executed, iffy service, or a dodgy product (except in the case of Nick).

So now is the time to get our act together, sign the new leases with a confident flourish, ramp up recruitment, wind up the training teams, polish the tarnished old formula and put the suppliers on their toes in the blocks ready for a flying start.

Crank up the creatives to leverage and ‘big up’ the feel-good factor that is a-comin’ with commercials chock-full of benefits that you don’t need Einstein’s IQ to understand and a call to action that defies confusion.

The retail climate is changing fast, the sun’s golden rays are shimmering on the horizon and boom is writ large in the clear, blue sky.

Remember farmers ‘make hay while the sun shines’. We retailers should prepare to do the same. So show some spirit and backbone and hoist the margin a few bps. Be bold, positive, optimistic and enthusiastic - it is highly contagious - and remember in retail fortune definitely favours the brave. Plan to book the airtime now and get ready to truck some hay into that big empty barn.