Meet my mother on the street and ask her age. The look and response you get will be inked in your brain forever. And you will never make that mistake again. You see, my mother does not view age in the context of bigger numbers are better. And it is her solid belief that her number is none of your business.
Some marketers could do well to take heed of this example. Far too often, it seems, marketers fall back on the age thing to substitute for any other real reason to believe that they are a better solution than their competition. Age, however, is not always a reason for credibility in a consumer's mind and, quite often, can actually be viewed as a negative.
Case in point. My wife was driving somewhere the other day and heard a commercial for Acme food markets. The ad was boasting of the fact that Acme is something like over 100 years old. Impressive, maybe, that they've been around that long. But is that a positive for a grocery store? When you think of produce, do you want the words "100 years old" running through your mind? With the advent of chains like Whole Foods and Wegmans, does old even mean better? I'd venture to guess not. Most folks probably want to think new and fresh and clean and modern when they think of grocery stores, not old and established and, perhaps, dusty.
I always found the marketing slogan for the regional smoothie chain Smoothie King to be similarly odd. Their major proclamation is "we started the whole smoothie thing." So?!?!?! That would be the equivalent of:
Fly Wright Brother's Air - we started the whole flying thing.
Drive a Ford - we started the whole car thing.
Atari - we started the whole video game thing.
Sony Walkman - we started the whole mobile music thing.
First doesn't mean best. And age doesn't necessarily mean most credible or trustworthy (unless you're talking about financial institutions or law firms and such). Find something more meaningful to talk about.
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