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When was the last time an ad made you buy something asks Anthony James

October 24, 2012 10:17 by M. Aldalou

What’s in it for the brand then? Why try Tryvertising?

Not to be too hard on advertising and marketing agencies but let me ask you something. When was the last time that a television advertisement of a toothpaste brand made you run out and buy that toothpaste? It’s a lot easier for consumers to continue buying brands that they know and like so how can a brand really influence what you buy?

They blast the media with traditional advertising and marketing. Occasionally they hand out free samples at the malls and people gladly take them because they’re free. But does that really mean they are influencing their purchasing habits? Brands have to think about relevance. Are we targeting the relevant people at the correct time to change their habits?

That’s what we do here, putting the consumer at the centre of the experience, and allow them to make their own decisions. We facilitate that interaction for brands.

Consumers in today’s society are bombarded with messages. They have access to information, reviews to read and social media. They would rather know what toothpaste their friends are using rather than what the brand says. Especially with today’s economic situation, our consumers are saying ‘hey, it’s my money. I’ll spend it on the products that I want to buy’.

All we do is start the conversation. We start that real engagement between the consumer and the brand. That’s called the first moment of the truth. The second moment of truth is the consumer trying out a brand’s product. The third moment of truth is getting the feedback about that product.

How effective is it though, practically?

A lot of brands see this model as really influencing purchasing habits. For a fact, over 70 percent of our consumers have actually gone out and bought the real products after evaluating them with us, and we know this through our internal surveys.

Imagine walking into a hypermarket aisle and all you see is juice, how do you make that decision of which to buy? It’s become confusing and brands have this belief that the ‘more I put out there, the more the chance of consumers buying my product’ but it just adds more confusion to the market. I don’t know half the brands, nor do I have the time or energy to evaluate all the brands. There’s too much choice.

Ultimately, our model puts the consumer fundamentally at the centre of the experience. A member that comes into our store is the most important person in the planet. This is your store, nobody is here to force you or influence you. It’s an experimentation space in a retail environment that cuts through the noise and clutter of traditional advertising.

Let’s get to your business side though. What exactly is your revenue model then?

A lot of people have been extremely speculative about how the revenue model for Tryvertising should be. What that has caused is a lot of copycat stores popping up and failing. No copy Tryvertising stores that I’ve seen have lasted longer than 6 months.

You have to realise that I launched this model in 2007 but I didn’t start franchising the model until 2010. That’s because we spent three years learning from our mistakes and how to make this model work and because of that, we do keep our model close to our chest. What I will tell you is that it does take a lot of detail and thinking and we needed three years getting it right.

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