Truth in advertising; service packaging; 'tingi' marketing

QUESTION: If consumer perception is the primary basis for getting people to buy products and services, does this mean that truth in advertising is irrelevant in marketing?
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Answer: On the contrary, what this means is that marketers ought to be extra careful in using consumer perception to motivate consumers through advertising.
As a marketer, you can use consumer perceptions for good or bad. Truth in advertising is good. Deception is bad. You can get away with it at first, but it won't last.
Consumers will, sooner or later, find out that they've been fooled. As Abraham Lincoln said: "You can fool some of the people some of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all the time."
Deception, of course, includes cases of keeping quiet about what you know may harm consumers. That's a case of withholding "truth."
Take the case of Merck's Vioxx, the acute pain killer and anti-arthritis medication that had to be withdrawn from the market because Merck, or more precisely its medical researchers, withheld from publication in the New England Journal of Medicine knowledge of three heart attacks among Vioxx's patients participating in the large scale clinical study of Vioxx.
The heart attacks took place in the final five weeks of the trial study. The patients who had the heart attack were supposedly at low risk for heart problems.
But this was not the only thing the Merck researchers withheld. The study had apparently found "more cardiovascular problems potentially connected to Vioxx."
These problems were not reported in the published study. Such withholding of knowledge is highly unethical and a serious breach of the Hippocratic oath.
In pharmaceutical marketing, published clinical studies are a powerful "advertising" material for persuading doctors, such that withholding knowledge of the three heart attacks and the connection to more cardiovascular problems violated the truth in advertising maxim.
Question: Your column mentioned that the consumers' first physical contact with a consumer product is not with the product itself, but the packaging. That's why you said it's critical to give packaging more than the passing attention it's given. How about in the case of services? Where is the first physical contact?
Answer: Think of consumer goods packaging as the product's tangible presentation at point of purchase. So let's rephrase your question into: "For a service, what is the tangible presentation at point of purchase?"
We've written before that a service is intangible. To give it a tangible presentation, you need (in the words of Ted Levitt of Harvard) to "tangibilize its intangibles." How do you do that?
Experts in service marketing say that service is presented to customers through three things: (1) a satisfying service staff, (2) a satisfying service venue, and (3) a satisfying service processing.
So there you are. A service packaging has three dimensions that you must all satisfy simultaneously.
It is because of this inseparable, multi-dimensional character of services that marketers like to say that service marketing is much more difficult than consumer goods marketing.
Notice that one of the three dimensions of service packaging involves a human being. That's not at all easy to control in terms of consistent quality.
Question: In "tingi" marketing, or low-unit pack/sachet marketing, how do you determine the right size to offer?
Answer: This is one of those marketing problems where you cannot go wrong if you go by the "marketing concept."
It's that concept that says: "Always start from where your consumers are and never from where you (as marketers) are." So find out what your target consumers' preference is. Or look around for a benchmark. Consider, for example, shampoo.
The size of its sachet is a single-use amount for its target consumer, the amount of which has been validated by a product test.
Or take cheddar cheese, the low unit pack of which is a single slice.
The size and thinness was determined largely by moms of school kids bringing cheese sandwiches.
Or take the latest mega users of "tingi," namely, Smart Communications Inc. (which pioneered it) and Globe Telecom Inc. (which followed suit after six months).
Both of these marketers have applied the low unit pack on SMS, the phone's so-called "killer application" and its "pasa load."
That "pasa" [transfer] load's tingi started with P5 and based on continuing consumer demand, has now gone down to the unbelievable pasa load amount of P2!
So the key to answering your question are your target consumers. Consult them. Learn from them.