What do junk mail and TV commercials have to do with each other? Simple; they are all excellent examples of The Bull’s Eye Effect. But wait. Don’t we usually throw away our junk mail and skip TV commercials? Well, yes we do, but… that doesn’t stop companies from making more and more every day.
Why? Simple: blame it on the “It Just So Happens” Effect…
Now, before you ask, the “It Just So Happens” Effect states that for every nine out of ten people who throw away that furniture flyer or carpet cleaning coupon that comes in the mail, there is one person who “just so happens” to need a new piece of furniture or their carpet cleaned at the exact same moment they received or opened the flyer.
Or “It Just So Happens” that they need their:
• Teeth whitened
• Hair cut
• Oil changed
• Cruise booked
• Gutters cleaned
• Driveway repaved
• Fill in the blank with what you do here…
Case in point: My friend’s wife just went back to work full-time. This was good news, great news, the best news – more money, more opportunity, more money – until the laundry started to pile up and the cupboards went bare and the floors got dirty and the toilets finally needed scrubbing. You see, my friend works from home – and while his wife was suddenly back out in the corporate world, he was left to fend for himself in the domestic jungle.
As a result, he became obsessed with household cleaning products. I don’t take words lightly; “obsessed” really is the right word here. I’d never heard him get so animated about anything as when he discovered the complete Swiffer line of products. Vacuums that dusted! Squeegees that squirted! Gloves that held static electricity! Mops that vacuumed first! Feather dusters attached to cans of spray wax! The list went on and on; you’d think it was baseball season and he was reporting the stats of the World Series pairings!
And it all started with one of those cut-out coupons in the Sunday circulars. One Swiffer ad for one Swiffer product – at the precise moment he was dreading another morning of cleaning and straightening up the house – and the rest just kind of snowballed; he was hooked. I can imagine him sitting there that very first Sunday morning, his wife sleeping late after a long work week, dust mites clinging to the hardwood floors, that big, clunky vacuum beckoning from the garage, the paper on his lap when, all of a sudden, he saw that Swiffer duster-vacuumer-squirtie-gizmo coupon and that’s when the “It Just So Happens” Effect took, well, effect!
My friend needed a quick, convenient, preferably disposable solution to his daily household cleaning chores and “It Just So Happens” there was a coupon for a quick, convenient, mostly disposable product staring back at him from some Sunday coupon book he’d probably thrown away without even looking at 4,000 Sundays in a row before.
But not this Sunday.
The “It Just So Happens” Effect keeps advertisers paying their mortgages even as our land sites fill with their product. It also keeps us buying, and before we enter the high-tech world of faith-based marketing in the chapters and sections to come, let us not snub the low-tech world of traditional advertising. Remember, it’s all just theory until the cash register rings up that first big sale. What makes it ring for you, for me, for everybody will be something different.
Until you find that “something different,” let’s not rule out anything; anything at all.
