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Some criticics say, "Madison Avenue has lost its power to turn lemons into lemonade!"
These campaigns have become the case studies to examine.
Advertisers have a tendency to think of good advertising as a panacea for low sales, and of
bad advertising as a cause of low sales; they sharply criticize ads, when sales don't
pick up, because they think of advertising as a panacea. In these cases, low sales are considered
in relation to advertising, rather than as a marketing or company problem. People agree that these
two campaigns are, however, almost stellar campaigns in terms of creativity itself.
Then what is really to blame for the failures?
In Subaru's case, dealers say that the spots didn't give consumers enough reason to buy
a Subaru instead of a Honda or a Toyota. Rick Desilva, President of Liberty Subaru in
Oradell, NJ, says, "We like the fact that they were giving us a new image. The agency
positioned Subaru as a car that appeals to solid values over glitz. But they weren't
giving us a product story." Even though Wieden created a splendid commercial, they
ignored the Subaru's features and the benefits for the consumers.
Unlike the Subaru campaign, American Express wanted advertising to stress its suitability,
as well as to play up the traditional benefits, such as the card's advantage of a preset
spending limit. Chiat's solution was to turn the card into an icon: "In its ads, the
card doubles as the tail of a supersonic jet or a ball that a golfer hits out a trap."
In the first quarter of 1991, the cardholders declined by 2.7 percent. People thought
that the campaign had been trying to say too many things at one time.
The conclusion is quite simple: When ads fail to read consumers' minds, no matter how
great the creativity is, they are bound to lose in the fierce competition.
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