As a nation we have fallen in love with the concept of “communication.” (In some grade schools “show and tell” is now being called “communication.”) We don’t always appreciate the damage being done by our overcommunicated society.
In communication, more is less. Our extravagant use of communication to solve a host of business and social problems has so jammed our channels that only a tiny fraction of all messages actually gets through. And not necessarily the most important ones either.
Take advertising, for example. With only 6 percent of the world’s population, America consumes 57 percent of the world’s advertising. (And you thought our use of energy was extravagant. Actually, we consume only 33 percent of the world’s energy.)
Advertising, of course, is only a small channel in the communication river.
Take books. Each year some 30,000 books are published in America. Every year another 30,000. Which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize it would take 17 years of reading 24 hours a day just to finish one year’s output.
Take newspapers. Each year American newspapers use more than 10 million tons of newsprint. Which means that the average person consumes 94 pounds of newsprint a year.
There’s some question whether the average person can digest all this information. The Sunday edition of a large metropolitan newspaper like The New York Times weighs about 4½ pounds and contains some 500,000 words. To read it all, at an average reading speed of 300 words per minute, would take almost 28 hours. Not only would your Sunday be shot, but also a good part of the rest of the week too.
How much is getting through?
Take television. A medium barely 35 years old. A powerful and pervasive medium, television didn’t replace radio or newspapers or magazines. Each of the three older media is bigger and stronger than it ever was.
Television is an additive medium. And the amount of communication added by television is awesome.
Ninety-eight percent of all American homes have at least one television set. (A third have two or more.)
Ninety-six percent of all television households can receive four or more TV stations. (A third can receive ten or more.)
The average American family watches television more than 7 hours a day. (More than 51 hours a week.)
Like motion pictures, the TV picture is really a still picture which changes 30 times a second. Which means the average American family is exposed to some 750,000 television pictures a day.
Not only are we being pictured to death, we are being papered to death. Take that Xerox machine down the hall. American business processes 1.4 trillion pieces of paper a year. That’s 5.6 billion every working day.
Down the halls at the Pentagon, copy machines crank out 350,000 pages a day for distribution throughout the Defense Department. Equal to 1000 good-sized novels.
“World War II will end,” said Field Marshal Montgomery, “when the warring nations run out of paper.”
Take packaging. An 8-ounce package of Total breakfast cereal contains 1268 words of copy on the box. Plus an offer for a free booklet on nutrition. (Which contains another 3200 words.)
The assault on the mind takes place in many different ways. The U.S. Congress passes some 500 laws a year (that’s bad enough), but regulatory agencies promulgate some 10,000 new rules and regulations in the same amount of time.
And the regulatory agencies are not stingy with their words either. Consider this: The Lord’s Prayer contains 56 words; the Gettysburg Address, 266; the Ten Commandments, 297; the Declaration of Independence, 300; and a recent U.S. government order setting the price of cabbage, 26,911.
At the state level, over 250,000 bills are introduced each year. And 25,000 pass the legislatures to disappear into the labyrinths of the law.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Ignorance of the lawmakers apparently is. Our legislators continue to pass thousands of laws that you can’t possibly keep track of. And even if you could, you couldn’t possibly remember how a law might differ from one of our 50 states to another.
Who reads, sees, or listens to all this outpouring of communication?
There’s a traffic jam on the turnpikes of the mind. Engines are overheating. Tempers are rising.
How much do you know about George Bush? Most people know just three things: (1) He’s good-looking. (2) He’s from Texas. (3) He’s Vice President of the United States.
Not much for a person who’s been in public service for a good part of his adult life. Yet that might be just enough to make Mr. Bush President of the United States in 1988.
Actually there are many people who don’t know Mr. Bush as well as you might think. A People magazine poll showed that 44 percent of supermarket shoppers didn’t know who George Bush was, even though he had been Vice President for 4 years.
On the other hand, 93 percent of the consumers recognized Mr. Clean, the genie on the bottle of the Procter & Gamble cleaner of the same name. They recognized Mr. Clean, even though he hadn’t been seen on television in 10 years, which shows the power of advertising to register a simple message.
What do you know about Ted Kennedy? Probably a lot more than you know about George Bush. And probably enough to keep him from being the next President of the United States.
At best, communication in an overcommunicated society is difficult. Yet you are often better off if communication doesn’t take place. At least until you are ready to position yourself for the long term. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
What do the following names mean to you: Camaro, Cavalier, Celebrity, Chevette, Citation, Corvette, and Monte Carlo?
Automobile model names, right? Would you be surprised to learn that these are all Chevrolet models?
Chevrolet is one of the most heavily advertised products in the world. In a recent year, General Motors spent more than $178 million to promote Chevrolet in the United States. That’s $487,000 a day, $20,000 an hour.
What do you know about Chevrolet? About Chevrolet engines, transmissions, tires? About the seats, upholstery, steering?
Be honest. How many Chevrolet models are you familiar with? And do you know the differences between them? Confusing, isn’t it?
The only answer to the problems of an overcommunicated society is the positioning answer. To cut through the traffic jam in the prospect’s mind, you must use Madison Avenue techniques.
Nearly half the jobs in the United States can be classified as information occupations. More and more people are trying to cope with the problems of our overcommunicated society.
Whether you have an information job or not, you can benefit from learning the lessons of Madison Avenue. At home and in the office.
Another reason our messages keep getting lost is the number of media we have invented to serve our communication needs.
There is television. Commercial, cable, and pay.
There’s radio. AM and FM.
There’s outdoor. Posters and billboards.
There are newspapers. Morning, evening, daily, weekly, and Sunday.
There are magazines. Mass magazines, class magazines, enthusiast magazines, business magazines, trade magazines.
And, of course, buses, trucks, streetcars, subways, and taxicabs. Generally speaking, anything that moves today is carrying a “message from our sponsor.”
Even the human body has become a walking billboard for Adidas, Gucci, Benetton, and Gloria Vanderbilt.
Take advertising again. Just after World War II, the percapita consumption of advertising in the United States was about $25 a year. Today it’s 15 times as much. (Inflation accounts for part of this increase, but volume is also up substantially.)
Do you know 15 times as much about the products you buy? You may be exposed to much more advertising, but your mind can’t absorb any more than it used to. There’s a finite limit to how much you can take in, and advertising, even at $25 a year, was already way over the limit. That 1-quart container that sits on top of your neck can hold just so much.
At $376 per person, the average American consumer is already exposed to twice as much advertising per year as the average Canadian. Four times as much as the average English person. And five times as much as the average French person.
While no one doubts the advertiser’s financial ability to dish it out, there’s some question about the consumer’s mental ability to take it all in.
Each day, thousands of advertising messages compete for a share of the prospect’s mind. And make no mistake about it, the mind is the battleground. Between 6 inches of gray matter is where the advertising war takes place. And the battle is rough, with no holds barred and no quarter given.
Advertising is a brutal business where mistakes can be costly. But out of the advertising wars, principles have been developed to help you cope with our overcommunicated society.
Another reason our messages keep getting lost is the number of products we have invented to take care of our physical and mental needs.
Take food for example. The average supermarket in the United States has some 12,000 individual products or brands on display. For the consumer, there’s no relief in sight. In fact, the product explosion could get worse. In Europe they are building super-supermarkets (called hypermarkets) with room for several times as many products. Biggs in Cincinnati, the first hypermarket in America, stocks 60,000 products.
The packaged-goods industry obviously expects the proliferation to continue. Those scratch marks on the side of most grocery boxes, the Universal Product Code, represent 10 digits. (Your social security number has only 9. And the system is designed to handle more than 200 million people.)
And this same situation holds in the industrial field. The Thomas Register, for example, lists 80,000 companies. There are 292 manufacturers of centrifugal pumps, 326 builders of electronic controls, to take two categories at random.
There are half a million active trademarks registered at the U.S. Patent Office. And 25,000 new ones get added every year. (Hundreds of thousands of products are sold without trademarks too.)
In a typical year, the 1500 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange introduce more than 5000 “significant” new products. And presumably a lot more than that were insignificant. Not to mention the millions of products and services marketed by America’s 5 million other corporations.
Take drugs. There are some 100,000 prescription drugs on the U.S. market. While many of these are specialized and used almost exclusively by medical specialists, the general practitioner still has a herculean job to keep informed about the multitude of drug products available.
Herculean? No, it’s an impossible job. Even Hercules himself could not have kept up with more than a small fraction of these drugs. To expect more is to be totally ignorant of the finite capacity of even the most brilliant mind.
And how does the average person cope with the product and media explosions? Not very well. Studies on the sensitivity of the human brain have established the existence of a phenomenon called “sensory overload.”
Scientists have discovered that a person is capable of receiving only a limited amount of sensation. Beyond a certain point, the brain goes blank and refuses to function normally. (Dentists have been toying with some of these discoveries. Earphones are placed on the patient, and the sound level is turned up until the sensation of pain no longer is felt.)
Ironically, as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up. Not just in volume, but in the number of users.
Doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants are dipping their toes into the advertising pool. Even institutions like churches, hospitals, and government have begun to advertise. (In a recent year the U.S. government spent $228,857,200 on advertising.)
Professional people used to consider advertising beneath their dignity. But as competition heats up, lawyers, dentists, optometrists, accountants, and architects are starting to promote themselves.
Cleveland-based Hyatt Legal Services is spending $4.5 million a year on television advertising. Jacoby & Meyers is another big legal advertiser.
Advertising is likely to start soon in the medical profession for a simple reason: Our overcommunicated society is in the process of becoming an overmedicated one too. A study for the Department of Health and Human Services predicts a surplus of about 70,000 doctors by 1990.
How will these excess doctors find patients to practice on? By advertising, of course.
But the professionals who are opposed to advertising say it downgrades their profession. And it does. To advertise effectively today, you have to get off your pedestal and put your ear to the ground. You have to get on the same wavelength as the prospect.