Sign Gnomes Are a Nuisance

 **To my marketing friends – I like to make you think and push you to find better, newer ways to advertise. If this article bothers you, GOOD!  If that is all it did, you need a new job.  Start thinking creatively and find new and ORIGINAL ways to communicate with the customers.  Isn’t that why you got into marketing in the first place?? Operations can’t function without marketing but, it can’t function with bland marketing either.

I was looking through old pictures and ran across this one from last year of political ads that were jammed on the side of the road.  What a waste of time and money.  It looks horrible and it is trash.  I have never been a proponent of using these signs.  They are a weak way to grab attention at best and at worst, they are a blurry mess that drivers ignore.

First of all, if there is one of these signs, there seems to be several more that creep in over time.  It’s like a virus.  I drive down the road and there is one or two.  By the morning, there are several more and none of them make me want to stop and buy anything. Is there some kind of sign gnome that no one told me about that grows ugly signs in the middle of the night on the side of the road?  We should start hunting these damnable gnomes. Or at the very least set traps and relocate them to Las Vegas.  They’d love sign-growing gnomes there.

It may be my age (early 40′s) but I can’t read most of the signs because the typeface is too small to read. They jam too many messages into that small space and I can’t read it as I meander down the road at a whopping 45 miles per hour.  Who are they selling to?  It must be the speed readers with good eyes.  They are BIG spenders from what I hear.  For average people it looks like a blurry mess at any speed over idle.  Since there are stacks of them lining the roads, I mostly ignore them.  If you’ve seen one sign, you’ve seen them all.

Has anyone thought about the fact that the signs are below the driver’s door?  Unless Wonder Woman traded her invisible jet for an invisible car she ain’t reading the sign.  For you, it is below the car’s window and can’t be read even when stopped.  If it is across the road, you aren’t even looking at it.  Believe it or not, the government figured this one out before marketing people.  Their signs are at eye level for most people or at least high enough that drivers can read them.  I don’t remember a Stop sign being inches from the ground.  Not sure that would work for traffic.  Put the signs up on higher stands and you are starting to get somewhere with your message.

Business owners, think about how you are talking to your customers when you spend marketing dollars.  I don’t have real numbers but I suspect there are more marketing people than lawyers…Yick!  Some want your money and are going to show you statistics that indicate they have the world’s best way to get customers.  Use your common sense and think like your customers.  Will customers be intrigued, interested, and stop in because of your marketing?  If not, don’t do it.  We talk a lot about simple ways to grow your business on Business Bulldog.  Speak volumes the right way and do something better than your competition.  As an example of the wrong way to do things, I have no idea who any of the people advertising in the picture claim to be.  They wanted me to vote for them.  I didn’t remember any of them when I did vote.  Blurry, bland marketing doesn’t work.

Just a thought, if those filthy gnomes grab me because I outed them, tell my family I love them.

Bob
BGriffin@BusinessBulldog.com