Andreas Buchholz, Wolfram Wrdemann
ISBN: 0-471-72025-9
Cloth
238 pages
April 2000

Most people in business are familiar with the old adage: only 20% of any advertising is effective ... it's just knowing what that 20% is. Buchholz and Wordemann posit that scientific evidence is available to show that 50% of the money spent on advertising is wasted - a big waste when you are looking at the 212 billion US dollars total advertising expenditure in 1999 in the USA, or 313 billion US dollars worldwide.This book aims to increase advertising effectiveness. The plan is to learn lessons from the few hundred bestselling brands of the world.

The result is a practical toolkit with 60 precise and proven successful advertising techniques which systematically help to build winner brands, achieve stepchange growth and solve any brand problem. eg: build your brand by creating an issue: for example, by triggering the need for an anti-dandruff shampoo (when, for many years dandruff was not regarded a serious problem) by dramatising the social embarassment of having dandruff. One company activated the market with an advert of a young actress suffering from an acute drandruff problem just before an important interview with the words I had already said goodbye to my career. But then, the product arrived just in time to rescue her professional success. The campaign was a big success.

Based on an analysis of 500 extremely effective advertising campaigns (ie: + 10% growth p.a. minimum) from all over the world the authors have identified the underlying strategies and the psychological/emotional techniques which make them successful. The toolkit is provides the answers to how exactly do these campaigns influence the purchase decision of the consumer. In the incredibly competitive arena of marketing and advertising the advise put forward in this book provide a kind of patent medicine to cure the problems encountered by brand owners.