Stand With Your Advertising

Most of your customers don’t completely trust your advertising. That’s the implication of results from a survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults conducted last month by Harris Interactive. Only about 20% of respondents said that advertising claims can be trusted most or all of the time. About 15% said they never trust advertising claims.
     Whether or not your retailing business is in the U.S, where this survey was done, distrust in advertising is an issue for you to act on.

• Assess the personality of your retailing that you project to your target audiences. Using the terminology of Stanford University researchers, lack of trust in your advertising is less likely to damage your store profitability if your business is seen as witty, exciting, or inquisitive than if you’re seen as sincere, predictable, or expert.
• You’ve the opportunity to distinguish yourself from the competition by building trust in what you promise. This Harris poll suggests that adult consumers start out being more trusting. The rate of saying ads can be trusted most or all of the time was one and a half times as high in 18-34 year olds as in those over age 54. Even among youngsters, a classic finding in consumer psychology is that children become less trusting of commercials as they get older.
• Some distrust comes from genuine misunderstanding. Researchers at University of Texas at Austin concluded that the average shopper has only about 65% accuracy when recalling what a printed ad actually says. Since the memory of older consumers is worse overall than that of younger ones, it might seem this would account for the lower trust in advertising among older adults. However, when it came to remembering what was in ads, the 65% accuracy rating generally held up across all age groups. The answer is to have ads available for ready reference in the store.
• Support regulation of advertising. Your philosophy might lead you to choose industry self-regulation or regulation by non-government organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau. But it is in the interest of retailers to have clear advertising standards along with meaningful penalties for violations. In the Harris survey, about half the respondents said they consider neither regulation by the government nor regulation by advertisers and the advertising industry sufficient to ensure advertising is honest.

Click below for more:
Project Your Store’s Personality
Have Staff Carry Copies of Store Ads