Miller Brewing Company found itself looking for a better way to advertise its product recently. “It’s a tough admission…but the company [Miller] has realized that the humor-and-babes model has failed to differentiate it from Anheuser-Busch.”

“We had forgotten why people drink our beer. We need to remind ourselves that consumers need a compelling reason to try and use your product…it sounds very basic, but we had forgotten that.”

“Being grounded with the consumer is maybe one of the biggest clichés in the world, but it’s one of the toughest things to make happen.”

I have in the past fielded the following question from clients, “If this is so easy, why don’t other ad agencies do it?” Or “What happens if our client’s competitors get and read the advertising? Won’t they go and copy it?”

The answer is, “They won’t – or don’t – understand it.” How does that jibe with you?

Most ad execs cling to a perception they were raised with and added to at famous universities. The research and information currently surrounding them about market awareness, branding, and focus group research is centered on a fundamentally different way of seeing things. Even though they say things like, “We need to remind ourselves that consumers need a compelling reason to try and use your product…it sounds very basic, but we had forgotten that.” The ad execs cannot see past what they hold as a truth:

Creativity to gather interest and repetition to keep it.

For them there is no other way. They are blind; they are trying to break out of the mold of their own creation, but they cannot see. The advertising world is waking up and it appears that most ad execs are feeling something. From the quotes I gave you – and these are not unique to Miller Brewing – there is a lot of worrying and hand wringing going on, especially in these tough economic times.

But they will not see it. Again, remember their focus, they see the process as one of creativity. They will always focus on the spurts of genius even with all the research; there is still the fact they will be faced with creating the ad out of the research. They will inevitably fall back onto the creative shops to churn out a 30 second TV commercial from all the research. There will be concept drawings, storyboards, and artistic renderings. After all, the research has to go somewhere.

Here is another reason why they will not see it. Here is a basic review of how these large firms thinks your mind works:

• You brain is stimulated with humor, sex, violence, and cleverness.

• You brain stores this info; the bigger the interrupt, the better remembered.

• The better remembered, the bigger the sales.

They believe that memory space translates into dollars. They literally start too far into the process; they would be better served by taking into account the beginning of the buying process. This is what we do. Here is the basic review of how we think the mind works:

• A prospect has a need.

• The prospect develops a hierarchy of what is important.

• The brain automatically seeks information.

• It ranks and categorizes the information.

• The information ranked the highest gets passed onto the consciousness.

• The business that provides the best information gets the sale.

The process is simple and easy to follow. The system results in marketing and advertising that hits the right Hot Buttons, speaks to the consumer in a compelling fashion, and gets the job done. But looking at the end product is no way to understand the system, your competitors might see it, they might mimic it, but they will not understand the principles so the result will be less than perfect.