“Meaningful Marketing: 100 Data-Proven Truths and 402 Practical Ideas for Selling More with Less Effort,” by Doug Hall with Jeffrey Stamp, Ph.D. (286 pages, Brain Brew Books, $24.99)

Substance beats “flash and sizzle” when it comes to marketing a new product.

If the product you’re trying to sell has a lot going for it, you shouldn’t have too much else going on around it.

That’s one of Doug Hall’s meaningful tips, found in “Data Proven Truth 40,” one of the 100 statistically verified truths about marketing in Hall’s new book, “Meaningful Marketing.”

The goal of meaningful marketing is to get customers to purchase products that can make a real difference for them. The more genuine and real your offering is, the more you should reduce stylistic distractions from your marketing messages and sales presentations, Hall writes.

He points out that customers have limited time and communication capacity to process information, and research shows that when they are “bombarded with engaging, exciting, or entertaining stimuli,” their ability to process and recall important sales messages is diminished.

Hall, the founder and CEO of the Eureka! Ranch think tank, cites research involving groups of television viewers in support of his point. In one of those studies, 324 adults were asked to recall advertising messages broadcast during three types of programs. One group watched programs featuring extreme violence. Another watched shows with explicit sex. The last group watched a show with more neutral content.

Twenty-four hours later, Hall writes, the participants were asked to recall what brands were advertised during the shows they watched.

“Those in the neutral program control group were able to recall 4.7 of the 9 brands,” Hall writes. “Those watching the violent show recalled 3.0 brands. Those watching the sexual show recalled 2.8 brands.”

He cites an Italian study that found that half as many men could remember a TV news story reported by a very attractive female than could remember it if reported by an average-looking reporter.

From that data-proven truth, Hall extracts four practical ideas. The first is to help customers focus upon what’s meaningful by simplifying marketing communications.

“Cut out meaningless distractions from your sales and marketing messages.

Simplify your marketing presentations to make your meaningful difference the “hero’ of your message,” Hall writes. Another of Hall’s practical ideas mined from his 40th truth is to slow communication.

“If we’re not careful, we will talk too fast for customers ter to provide a step-by-step explanation or to provide documents or Web sites for teaching customers the same fundamentals that you know,” Hall writes.

He also advises showing your product.

“Many advertising and sales presentations feature lots of talk and little product. If you have a meaningfully great product, show it. Make the product the center of every piece of customer communications.”

His other practical idea from “Truth 40” follows logically.

“When you don’t have anything meaningful to communicate to your customers, then your odds of success are greater if you turn up the flash, sizzle and hype,” Hall writes. “But beware, in the long term, this is a losing strategy. At best, it can work for a short time.”

That practical idea speaks to the heart of what Hall endeavors to convey in this book – the differences between and uses of meaningful marketing and mindless marketing.

“Meaningful Marketing is about honestly communicating to customers exactly how your offering will make a genuine difference in their lives.

“Alternatively, Mindless Marketing is about using sales trickery, the brute force of massive advertising campaigns or endless price manipulations to persuade customers to purchase,” he writes.

Although Hall concedes that mindless marketing is often effective in the short run, he believes that it cannot be relied upon to generate long-term success.

Meaningful marketing, Hall says, can lead to meaningful loyalty. Customers come to have such confidence in a brand that they buy it out of habit. But Hall sees a danger there. He sees loyalty buying as mindless buying in that “customers are on autopilot.” Such customers, he insists, can be stolen by competitors who are willing to think big and boldly and offer a meaningful difference.

There is, Hall points out, a third option to meaningful marketing and mindless marketing. He refers to it as “Meaningless Marketing.”

“Meaningless lacks the substance of Meaningful Marketing or the clever trickery of Mindless Marketing – Sadly, in many categories Meaningless Marketing is the primary form of marketing.”

This book does offer a meaningful benefit to its potential customers. It is clearly based on solid research. And it is presented in a format that makes it user-friendly. It presents significant findings and explains the nature of the research from which they are derived. It then shows the readers how to apply them to their marketing challenges.