In the wild world of business, the main rule is pretty simple: you gotta make money to stick around. For instance, you want a haircut. They provide the scissors and the skills, and you hand over some cash. You both walk away winners, you with a fresh trim and them with the means to, well, not starve. It’s a beautiful, if unglamorous, dance of supply and demand. In this normal, run-of-the-mill business world, there’s really nothing to complain about. It’s just two people getting what they want.
Advertising, however, can be annoying. It pops up everywhere, honking for attention, even when you didn’t ask for it. You’re watching an emotional movie scene where the dog finally comes home, and suddenly, BAM! A guy in khakis is shouting about car insurance. Still, it’s not all bad. In exchange for sitting through 30 seconds of someone yelling “SALE! SALE! SALE!,” you get entire blockbuster movies for free. Honestly, not a terrible trade.
But then there’s a special kind of advertising that’s not just tolerable, it’s actually kind of lovely. That’s when businesses brag about doing something good. They might say, “We donate 10% of our profits to charity,” or “Our CEO personally wrestled a bear to save an orphanage,” or “Our product is so eco-friendly, squirrels use it as furniture.” When businesses flex their goodness like this, it’s worth cheering for them – and worth buying from them too. Because in that scenario, everybody wins: the business, the customers, the community, and even the squirrels.
A form of advertising that’s under-utilized is novelty advertising. The common form is when a business has a large quantity of something fun or useful imprinted with their info. For instance, your author owned a bicycle shop in the 1970s. He got this crazy notion to have little tape measure / keyrings made up that contained the shop’s contact info. They cost almost a buck each, which was real money back then. Still, your author gave them out like water to pretty much everyone. Sure enough, people used those tape measures, told their friends, and bicycle sales grew tremendously.
Bottom line: If a business spends energy or money in doing something beneficial, their profit will increase.
