An honest approach to marketing – time to ditch your old-school advertising
What is advertising?
Is it the Mad Men-style brashness and slick straplines of the 50s and 60s? Is it the no–
expense-spared photo shoots on pristine desert islands excesses of the 70s and 80s?
Or is it the lad and ladette-focused soundbites of the 90s?
In 2015, advertising and marketing are probably none of those things. And haven’t been
for a very long time. But you wouldn’t know it to look at some accountants’ websites.
And that’s because there’s been a fundamental change in the underlying approach to
how you should market your business – and plenty of accountants just haven’t caught
up with this quintessential change in approach.
The old-school approach
The old approach to marketing your accountancy practice owed a lot to the bad old
days of advertising. If there was a maxim for advertising at the end of the 20th century
then is was almost certainly this: ‘Under no circumstances actually tell the truth about
this product’.
The key to all advertising and marketing was to lie to people, to promote an untruth or to
create positive associations with your product or service that bore very little relationship
