I was reading a newspaper advertisement for Fry’s Electronics today. A new store is opening nearby, and they have a huge grand opening sale going on. I like that chain of stores, as sometimes they have really good deals on electronics. I usually consult a few people before buying electronics, and was showing some of the ads to a good friend of mine, Stapled, when I saw an ad that did not mention the screen size of an LCD monitor for sale.

For the past year or so, I have seen different kinds of ads that don’t mention crucial details about the product being sold. For example, Best Buy will put out an ad that mentions a computer that’s supposed to be nice, but it does not mention how much RAM it comes with. Similarly, some local newspaper ads for digital cameras at places like Target or Walmart don’t mention how many megapixels [MP] the camera has. You can find such ads yourself easily; pick up your local newspaper today and read the advertised section. You’re bound to find some product which has almost no mention of the important details that matter.

Similarly, imagine seeing an ad for a “power-house” computer from Best Buy, making you drive down to the store to find out it comes with 128 mb ram. For those of you who play with images or movies and games, you know that 128 mb of ram these days means driving a car that goes up to 10 miles per hour and gives out 5 miles per gallon; it’s not good. Such a tactic aims to lure in buyers who are impatient and will buy anything depending on the price, either because of their budget range, lack of knowledge about a certain product or because of their dire need for such a thing. It can help in bringing in customers to a store who want to inquire about the product, but it shows the store’s lack of knowledge to people who know about things, resulting in many people not preferring certain stores when it comes to certain products. Why should you spend hours to find out more information about a product when you have competing product from someone else, which is of the same or even better quality, with all the information you need available easily?

The philosophy behind such ads is simple in many cases; imagine going to a Walmart store to get a $19 digital camera. You drive down to the store, and go into the electronics section to find the camera you think you think you’re going to get married with. Once you find the camera, you usually find out that finding the perfect partner so easily comes with a price; the camera looks cheap, feels like plastic, and the quality of the pictures is worse than a doctors’ handwriting on a prescription . On your way out of the store, however, you’re probably going to get some candy and other things. That’s the whole point of such ads; the advertising worked in your case, and the store got a customer for at least one sale.

I’ve seen ads in local classified, by individual sellers that advertise a certain used car for sale, but fail to mention the number of miles on the car or even the year of the car. “Honda ACCORD for sale!! EXCELLENT CONDITION!! GARAGE KEPT!” does not tell you anything about the car. Imagine buying a house when you have knowledge of the number of rooms in the house, but no idea on how many windows, if any, the house has. For me, an ad should be concise and focus on the product details and the price directly; that way, both the customer and the seller get what they want from the information. Sure you wouldn’t want to throw unnecessary information at ‘newbies‘ who are buying a product for the first time and don’t care about details or quality of the product. However, the more information you give out about your product in a way that’s understandable by anyone, the better it is for everyone.

Unless you’re a “dedicated” salesmen, you should tell your customers what they’re buying so that later on they don’t come back to you with complaints. Why not educate the customer about the specifics of a product so that they know what they’re buying? If you have a good product, they will surely buy from you once they know how the different details fit together. We should do away with the age of keeping the customer in the dark about specific details about products and making them buy a digital camera so that they can “push buttons to take magical pictures without the need of a film.” Instead, let’s sell a car to someone while telling them how mileages can be a good or a bad thing, and why the car we’re is good for that customer.

Next time you see an ad in the newspaper, try to see if it covers all the basics, or if it simply wants you to rush into the store. I’m tired of going into stores simply to find out that the product is not what it looked like in the ad, which usually results in me buying a Toblerone on the way out.