Originally posted by: CPA
Originally posted by: sirjonk
Glad it's working for you but if anything ever really worked for most people they wouldn't have to sell it so hard, word of mouth would do the job.
What? why would any successful company advertise if this was true?
It depends on the nature of the product.
Coke and Pepsi advertise not based on effectiveness, but on preference. You don't drink them because they work, but because you like the taste. They spend millions just to build up the brand and get you to pick their brand off the shelf first when you have access to both. Neither product can be called objectively superior.
Then there are products that are proven to work, like KrazyGlue, which you don't see a whole hell of a lot of ads for anymore. It's in the public conscienceness, like Kleenex, and at that level of saturation, ads are more about reminding people you're out there and maintaining the level of ubiquity you have, rather than convincing people the product is effective.
And then you have various health, beauty and other products, like pro-active, which make various claims as to their effectiveness, but people still jump from one to another searching for the cure to their ill. I have gone through every different brand of bodywash, shampoo and antiperspirant to see which works best, but ultimately it doesn't seem to make my hair any nicer or my body any cleaner. Dishwash soaps all claim to be most effective with grease, but I couldn't care less if it was dawn or palmolive or whatever, it all seems about equally effective in cleaning dishes. Pro-active fits in with the oxy/clearasil crowd where people are desperate to get rid of pimples and will try anything. As a teen I definitely tried the creams, pads or whatever else, but you know what? I still had pimples. And whether or not you put on cream they seemed to stick around for a few days and then fade away. If any of these products in this paragraph were measurably more effective than their competitors, word would get out. If pro-active really got rid of all the problems it's designed to, Oxy and clearasil would disappear.