Transform the negative aspects of your products into qualities


This may appear perverse: following all, everyone promotes their product's positive aspects and plays down the negatives. Nevertheless, individuals are nonetheless aware of the negatives - ignoring this elephant in the family room is most likely to cause problems if you don't address it.

No quantity of positive promotion will overcome a serious negative, simply because individuals will assess your promotion in the light of what they already know - and if what they know about you is poor, they'll merely not accept your positive messages.

When diesel fuel was first used for road vehicles, it was nearly exclusively used for commercial vehicles like buses, lorries, and some taxis. Diesel was regarded as the fuel for smelly, noisy, lowperformance workhorses: the oil crisis of the 1970s changed that, with the development of high-performance diesels for cars.

The greater fuel efficiency, cheaper fuel, and lower emissions meant that Continental drivers switched to diesel in their millions, but in Britain the advantages had been less obvious - a small, crowded nation with urban driving being the norm meant that diesel was slower to catch on.

Volkswagen saw this as a golden chance. VW started a campaign designed to overcome the "workhorse" image of diesel.

The campaign was humorous, showing people forgetting that their high-performance VW ran on diesel - leaving notes on their personal windscreens, pulling up at the wrong pump, tying knots in their handkerchiefs.

These adverts generated much higher than average recall, and VW's diesel sales rose 40 percent, making it the marketplace leader and displacing Peugeot; 43 percent of VW's new cars sold in Britain in 2002 had been diesels. The campaign was repeated in 2003 and 2004, with equally dramatic results.

Find out what individuals Do not like about your product (or about your company, for that matter). If you have a negative USP (distinctive selling proposition), attempt to think of a humorous way of promoting it. Be prepared to promote heavily. Do not anticipate instant results - it takes time to alter opinions.

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