Ch. 5 How Frequency Builds Trust and Permission Facilitates Frequency: The unspoken secret that marketers are afraid to utter.

Where does trust come from?• It’s a process that requires time, money & commitment• Before trust, a marketer must gain familiarity• In order to gain familiarity, a marketer needs awareness• Awareness can’t happen effectively without advertising

How to Turn Awareness into Familiarity• Important tactic: frequency• Advertising agencies look at reach & frequency when measuring ad campaigns• A single ad is almost never enough to sell a product—frequency works• Although it’s important to reach every customer, it’s essential to deliver advertising with frequency (drill it home again & again)

• Frequency brought to an ad campaign does two things:

1. It cuts through clutter with the sheer law of averages

2. Frequency causes the consumer to focus on the message you’re trying to get across

• Nicholas Negroponte’s (MIT Media Lab) analogy: When you double the length of a fish, it’s weight goes up by a factor of four—the same is true for advertising: When you increase your frequency by 100 percent, you usually increase your effectiveness by 400 percent

(pp. 79-84)

Ch. 5 cont. (pp. 84-90)

Frequency and Trust Outweigh Reach and Its Glamour

• The problem with frequency is that it’s expensive

• The reason national advertisers need to spend so much money is that without reach & frequency, you can’t build a national brand

• Marketing guru Jay Levinson says you have to run an ad 27 times to an individual before it has desired impact because only 1 of 9 ads is seen & it must be seen 3 times before it sinks in

• The accountant is the only person who decides when advertising is changed– when the ad stops working & the look isn’t profitable, change it

• Another problem with frequency is that it reaches a small percentage of the audience, but you do reach the most profitable prospects with frequency

• Permission Marketing will allow you to figure out how to make your frequency more effective

Frequency-Related Marketing Problems2. Because people don’t pay attention

to advertising, ads that run without a lot of frequency are ignored.

3. Because marketers must interrupt a busy consumer, advertising carries a lot of fluff and sizzle along with the message, so there isn’t a lot of room to tell a compelling story.

4. Because consumers are over-whelmed with data, they ignore or misunderstand most new concepts.

5. Frequency is extremely expensive, and it’s tempting to focus on untouched consumers instead of those who haven’t yet responded.

6. Running ads frequently is boring

Ch. 5 cont. (pp. 90-96)

Permission Empowers Frequency• Examples of trusted national brands:

Crisco, Tabasco, Campbell’s, Vaseline, and Arm & Hammer (most Americans have every single one of these in their house & each product was introduced over 50 years ago)

• Why do you trust them? Because over the years you’ve been inundated with frequent messages about their quality and reliability & all these brands are now coasting

• Because they’re trusted, they’re profitable—frequency led to aware-ness, awareness to familiarity & familiarity to trust & trust leads to profit

• If you can get the right to communicate with permission, you’ve just obtained the right to use frequency

• At Permission Marketing’s core is traditional thinking about advertising—interrupting people, gaining attention & communicating a basic idea in just a few moments

• Memorable ads were consistent and frequent, omnipresent & drove it home again and again

• Permission Marketing allows the same effectiveness & encourages commitment & frequency, but it replaces continuing interruption with ongoing interaction

• With Permission Marketing, for the first time in this arena of growing clutter, frequency is effective and efficient

• Permission Marketing takes the efficiency that comes from having prospects pay attention & turns the savings into frequency. Once you know that the majority of people targeted want to hear from you, frequency starts looking pretty attractive. And when you can use the power of new media for free, you hit a home run

• Trust comes from frequency, but before frequency turns into sales, it turns into permission—it’s just a step away from trust