[Christmas Special] Soft Sell and Hard Sell

"Primadonna girl, yeah
All I ever wanted was the world
I can't help that I need it all
The primadonna life, the rise and fall

[...]

Would you do anything for me?
Buy a big diamond ring for me?"

"Primadonna" - Marina And The Diamonds
  

For today's task, since it's the last English blog session before Christmas holidays, we've been asked to do a Christmas special. Concretely, we had to look up for the difference between soft sell and hard sell (which are marketing techniques) and examples (ads) for each.

Soft sell is considered to be the kind of advertising which uses friendly, subtle or casual sales messages, leading to a less conditioning way of publicity. It's also considered the most effective way of persuasion, since it's been proven that costumers feel so much less irritated than with hard sell.

Hard sell, as an opposition to soft sell, is the kind of advertising which uses a direct, forceful and evident sales message, which has been proven to be more likely to irritate costumers.

 Here are some examples, one for each concept:

I would say this is quite a good example of a Christmas ad using hard sell, since the publicised product is shown since the start of the advertisement and is seen several times during its progress.

Though Christmas is not explicitly a topic of this advert, I would say it is a good example of a Christmas ad using soft sell. Not only because funny stuff just can't be as irritating as hard sell publicity, but also because the product (in this case, the institution) is not shown until the end.