Single Message Marketing Discipline

“As a marketing ethos, 'Say Goodbye to the Bag' has been criticised as insufficiently 'proactive', a word I hate. Why don't we tell people how the machine dry-cleans, how it climbs stairs, how it has an automatic hose action? The answer is twofold: you can't sell more than one message at a time, or you lose the belief of the consumer, and we had to establish, beyond all question, that our machine overcame a problem that all other systems suffered from.”

“For each function Deirdre designed a brochure, and they began to sell. And it all seemed so obvious: you simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several. Why tell them this thing was universally adaptable when universality mattered to the individual consumer not a whit? It was for the same reason that when”