On the way home from the fair the other day, I noticed a marquee sign in a small community proclaiming “Best Thai Food in Town!”
Now, I like Thai food, and this place might be wonderful. But instead of convincing me that I should stop by, the sign made me wonder: Can there be more than one Thai place in town? Is this the best claim to fame that the owner can come up with, even if there is a second Thai place?
We stopped somewhere else.
I’m not trying to pick on this harried restaurateur. In fact, the experience was one of several I had last week that got me to thinking about the unintended consequences that marketing choices can create in the mind of a potential customer.
If you shoot too low with your superlative, the claim will make the shopper wonder whether there is much of an attraction there. If you overstate your case and claim to the best Thai food in the world, for example, you also are likely to turn them off with a “yeah, right” response.
Instead, entrepreneurs should shoot for the highest point that they can justify. You are aiming for something like “Best Thai Food in Maine” or, if that’s a stretch, just “Great Thai Food.”
Another incident occurred in the supermarket, where I was looking at paper goods and came across “Earth First” paper towels, which are environmentally friendly and marketed toward “green” consumers.
With some research, I learned that the towels are made by Royal Paper Converting Inc., which is based in Arizona. Its corporate website has some fun pictures of children playing with paper towel rolls and running through green fields.
But it took a little work to find that site. The reason?
Type “Earth First” into Google and you’ll get “Earth First! Worldwide” as the first listing, and related content for most of the other results on the first couple of pages. (The paper towel is nowhere to be found.)
The “Earth First!” website is topped by a throbbing, angry green fist. Earth First! is a militant environmental group with the motto “No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth!”
Though both organizations show concern for the environment, there’s a real clash here between the image the paper company is trying to convey and the one the activists are pursuing. Until I did some research, I wondered whether there was some affiliation between the group and the consumer product. I chose Bounty.
What’s my point?
Think about how the consumer might make connections, either good or bad, between the words you use and other aspects of the society in which we live. Words don’t existing in a vacuum. They live among the many stray thoughts, unintended connections and powerful feelings that exist within every individual.
Unsure what the connections might be? Google it. The search engine finds the most-common linkages between words and human thought, as expressed in websites.
Via Google, “Best Thai Food in Town” sends you to proud restaurants in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Toronto. Not the Lakes Region of southern Maine.
– Eric Blom
