Marketing attempts to take advantage of a simple weakness that is unavoidable: being ignorant of the truth. But that is only true initially. We might believe the advertising claims because we have no “data” in our memory banks to tell us the ad claims are false. Once we actually do business with the company or purchase their product, we gain that data a la experience. If said experience is negative, we don’t go back or we don’t purchase the product again. And we often tell others about it.

Consumers are becoming a bit more savvy. They are better equipped with the ability to go online and read customer reviews, complaints, etc. To offset this, companies merely spend more and more money trying to advertise false claims to the contrary in order to get new “suckers” to give up their money. Where a lot of potentially good companies miss the golden opportunity is that instead of spending more money to make more false claims, they should instead invest in fixing the problem — improve the quality of the services or goods. Then be honest in telling John Q. Public — we are “New and improved” or “Under new management,” so to speak.

“It’s far cheaper to keep a customer than to earn a new one.” We’ve all heard that over and over. But we haven’t internalized it. Advertising companies don’t want us to think about that because they have a devil of a time figuring out how to make a commission off of “word of mouth” referrals and good, old fashioned, reputability.

Perhaps the last fact above is why we’re seeing a whole new breed of advertising specialists succeed. The new — shall we say more “sustainable” — breed of advertising firms are the ones who take the approach “If you offer great services and products, we will help you establish a viral marketing campaign.” The best of the best of these know from the outset that they don’t want to get caught dead trying to market a dud. They want to align themselves with real winners and build their reputation on it.