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"

"Any little design improvement that you try to make will inevitably be used to exploit you by your opposition. For example, when Hoover were getting rattled by our success, they decided to claim that their machines had much greater suck than ours. They attempted to prove this by orchestrating a publicity stunt in which they presented a thing they called a suction gauge which they put over the nozzle of their hose, and then over ours. It covered the inlet completely and pur- ported to register a pressure reading. The Hoover won."