Can Advertising Create A Need?

Below you will find a recent blogpost written by UK advertising legend Dave Trott.

It is so good, we just had to publish it on our own blog.


Here it goes:

Akio Morita was the founder of Sony. Apparently how he got started was that, after the war, he bought several dozen wire-recorders from the US army.

These were an early form of tape recorder. When he bought them he didn’t know what he was going to do with them.

He knew the possibilities of this new technology excited him. The trouble was, there was no demand for it.

Being unable to record sound and instantly play it back was not a problem that needed solving. At least not for the average person.

Before Akio Morita could satisfy a demand, he needed to create one. So he wrote a small pamphlet about the uses and possibilities of a wire recorder. And he distributed it to schools in the Tokyo area.

Pretty soon the schools were clamoring to buy his wire recorders. He sold out, and that was the start of Sony.

Years later he saw the possibilities in transistors. Until that point, radios and TVs had used big old-fashioned ‘valves’.

These looked like light bulbs. They were about the same size and just as fragile.

Akio Morita realized that by using transistors instead, he could make technology smaller and tougher. In fact, truly portable for the first time.

One of his first uses of this was a tiny radio. At least it was tiny by the standards of the day.

It was about six inches long, four inches wide, and an inch deep. The problem was the demand for a portable radio didn’t exist.

So, before he could satisfy a demand, Morita knew he needed to create one.

He told his salesman they should demonstrate how amazing the radio was by popping it into their shirt pocket. The problem was it didn’t fit.

So Morita had hundreds of shirts made with slightly oversize pockets. He issued these for each of his salesmen to use when demonstrating the radio.

Sony created the market for tiny portable radios.

Years later his research and development people came up with a tiny tape cassette player that gave great sound. But it had no speakers. And it couldn’t record.

The Sony marketing department said the product wouldn’t sell. No one was asking for a cassette player that didn’t record and only worked with headphones.

Akio Morita knew, before he could satisfy a demand, he had to create one. So before he launched the product, he gave it away to opinion formers.

Professional musicians, recording studios, music journalists, composers. They all talked, and wrote, about the fantastic quality of the sound. Pretty soon the public were clamoring to buy it.

That was the Sony Walkman.

But before Akio Morita created the supply, the demand didn’t exist.

Adam Morgan wrote the book “Eating The Big Fish” which launched the concept of ‘challenger brands’.

Adam was telling me about an experiment in Canada. A company wasn’t sure about the value of its advertising. So, to see what would happen, they only advertised in half the country.

Sales didn’t seem to go up, so they stopped advertising.

Instead they did a coupon drop over the entire country. But only half the country used the coupons. Guess which half.

If the demand doesn’t exist, you can’t satisfy it.

Henry Ford said, “Before the automobile existed, if I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”

People aren’t visionaries. They can’t know they want something that doesn’t exist.

Sometimes you have to create the demand before you can satisfy it.

That’s called advertising. Creating a demand.

Akio Morita said, “The greatest assistance I had in growing my company was the total failure of nerve on the part of western businessmen to make a move without research.”

Marshall McLuhan put it differently. He said, “Running a business based only on research, is like driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror.”


(you can find more off Dave Trott's wisdom over at www.cstadvertising.com/blog)