Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, answered a question about creating buzz in Inc magazine’s October 2008 issue with some profound insight:
Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.
Robert had to bootstrap his business and didn’t have the money to advertise. His business flourished because of word of mouth referrals. Being remarkable is a surefire way to get people talking about you. Seth Godin reminded us of this in his Purple Cow book.
When you view advertising as a tax, it no longer becomes the standard operating procedure for your company. Just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean you have to throw away your cash on the same thing.
If you embraced the constraint that you couldn’t advertise, what would you do to acquire customers?
Provide outstanding customer service as your marketing?
How about encourage word of mouth referrals?
Any way you’d slice it, you’d have to get creative. In so doing, you will probably even see ways to refine and focus your advertising message should you choose that path.
Advertising costs added to products are basically a tax to every consumer. Those advertising dollars are going towards sporting events and the entertainment industry, putting billions of dollars every year into their pockets. The consumer has no input into how those advertising (tax) dollars are spent – paying athletes multi-million dollars per year is idiotic when we cry foul that an elected official gets paid a couple hundred thousand per year. I believe that all industries that receive advertising dollars should be regulated by the consumers, and no advertising receiving industry should be allowed to pay any individual more than what the President of the United States is paid. No athlete, entertainer, Network, radio, or print media employee should be paid millions of dollars each year from the advertising tax that is currently being assessed to every consumer. It is idiotic that we complain so much about the amout of federal and state tax we pay and how the government is wasting that money, but we never complain about the amount we pay towards advertising on every product and how idiotic it is to pay any athlete or movie star $25-50 millions dollars per year. Advertising needs to be regulated and consumers need to be made aware of how much advertising is impacting the costs of everyday products. All sporting events and all TV should be pay-per-view, and then let the industries decide how much they can really spend on advertising when the consumer is aware of what is actually being spent every day for ‘free’ TV, radio, and internet.
@John – interesting take on how our “tax” dollars are being spent. It is a tax on the businesses who are unremarkable and to us the consumers who pay extra to support this repeating cycle.