Neural Advertising With Subliminal Messages Or Truth In Advertising – Which Is Better For Your Business Website?

Neural marketing or neural advertising is advertising that appeals directly to our senses, our eyes, ears, and nose instead of trying to persuade the brain by engaging our critical thinking ability. For example used car dealers spray “the new car smell” inside old cars from a handy spray container, and McDonalds has some sort of a special “floral” scent that they add to the detergent used for cleaning the floor. The floral scent will make you feel good about yourself and you will come back for more junk food.

In fact most types of advertising are usually trying to circumvent our critical thinking ability by playing on our emotions to convince us that we absolutely must have something that we don’t really need at all.

And then there is advertising that is simply based on outright lies, such as “You can learn any language in 10 days if you buy our CD for only 9.99 dollars“. Advertising that is based on shameless lies probably works the best in terms of how much money one can make from suckers who will fall for it. Of course, not only do you not learn a language in 10 days if you buy the CD, but you will have to waste hundreds of additional dollars on other CDs because by buying 1 CD you agreed to buy the entire course. You should have read the last clause hidden in small print at the end of a long paragraph.

In a world filled with highly deceitful advertising ad nauseam, what kind of design should one use for a website informing the world about a new translation business?

I personally believe in an advertising concept that is not seen or practiced very often – a website for translation services that is trying to appeal to the brain without using deceit.

Thousands of websites of small and large translation agencies and even some translators have the same content: Photoshoped smiling faces of beautiful, pensive young people who have absolutely nothing to do with translation. One reason for this is that that many website hosting companies will throw in a generic free website if you buy their hosting plan.

Is it a good idea to do that? It’s free! Well, it’s probably better to have a generic website than to have no website at all.

But I think that it is much better to have a website that tells the world a real, original story that people will be able to remember instead of insulting their intelligence with photoshopped images of smiling mannequins.

Most patent law firms, for example, have on their websites a pull down menu where a potential customer can look up the lawyers, see what they look like, find out about their education, specialty and experience. I personally find this very handy because when a new patent law firm finds my website, I know exactly who my customer is.

 This kind of information is often missing on the websites of translation agencies, especially those that specialize in “any language, any direction, any subject”, which seems to be a good deal of them. I sometime wonder why don’t they add “any planet, any galaxy” as well. Why not go the whole way?

 But when an agency or translator’s website does have the relevant information about the people behind the translation service, I read it with interest and tend to remember the details for a long time. You can only get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of a translation business if you know something about the people who run the business. To read “Our Mission Statement” on a website is a complete waste of time because nobody ever says the truth in it. At least so far I have never seen something along the lines “Our Mission is to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible”, which is always the case with contemporary commercial enterprises.

 Real, truthful information must be much more effective than subliminal messages hidden in scents, sounds and words cranked out by the millions daily by modern advertising advertisement industry with a particular type of customer – the thinking type.

 But unlike subliminal messages, real information is not very common in advertising, possibly because the thinking kind of customer is not very common either.

A QUESTION FOR READERS OF THIS BLOG

Please let me know if you find my habit of framing my posts in two music videos somewhat irritating and if you would prefer if I stopped doing that.