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Issue 1 > Transparent marketing: how to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer.

Transparent marketing: how to earn the trust of a skeptical consumer.

Marketing Experiments with five key principles for treating our customers with the respect we'd expect.

OK, marketing pro, let's take a quick test. The following sales copy is excerpted from the Altoona Tribune. Just how effective do you think it could be? Is it persuasive? What is your instant reaction to the tone of the message?

Modoc Oil—the greatest medicine on earth. It has no equal. It relieves all pain instantly… Toothache in one minute. Headache in one minute. Earache in ten minutes. Sore throat in one night. Neuralgia in from three to five minutes.

Modoc Oil can be used internally as well as externally without the least danger. It has never been known to injure anyone young or old. One of the most valuable properties of this oil is its adaptability in painful diseases of children. Should your baby show any symptoms of pain in the stomach or bowels, wet immediately a flannel cloth and lay it on the seat of pain. Relief will certainly follow in less than ten minutes.

Modoc Oil is a sure and speedy cure. Every family should have a bottle within reach. It's a doctor in the house.[1]

Brash, isn't it? Would you rush out and buy a bottle of this miracle cure? Would anyone? In 1885 the demand was so strong that the Oregon Indian Medicine Company had to build a new plant encompassing an entire city block of Corry, Pennsylvania. As late as 1912, the Company was still in full production with a popular price point of fifty cents per bottle.[2]

What about today? How would such blatant copy be received in our cynical marketplace? Researchers at MarketingExperiments recently endeavored to place the very same ad in the Altoona Mirror (The Tribune is no longer published).

But the Mirror wouldn't accept the copy, and neither would any other major metropolitan newspaper. A fairly predictable result—but it demonstrates a vital point. This original ad worked only because people trusted and believed its message. Not anymore.

With each passing nanosecond, consumers are growing more and more jaded. It is difficult to fathom just how skeptical this generation has become—skeptical and wary. The average person is assaulted with a barrage of 577 new marketing messages per week.

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