To understand what marketing in today’s digital age is all about, we must first understand the simple concepts of marketing. Marketing is different from person, to person. We all fall in one of the three categories mentioned below with regard to our general sentiment toward marketing.
Some people believe that marketing is a form of entertainment. This can simply be all the advertisements we see daily that incorporate the humour feel to them. These advertisements are usually tailored to stimulate a specific emotion in us so that we can associate certain colours, patterns, songs and even smells with a specific brand.
Some people tend to say that advertisements do not have an effect on them. This group of people tend to say “I do not buy based on a brand, I buy based on what I believe.” This thinking may sound simple but when it comes to marketing it may be a different story. This is because advertisers must know and appeal to the relevant audiences by offering them what they are most likely to be interested in.
The last group of people believe that marketing is evil. They believe that it is filled up with your sneaky salesmen who are constantly trying to offer them products that they do not need as a way of squeezing money out of them.
All these general sentiments may sound flawed, but in reality, they are not necessarily wrong. It is simply just how people feel towards a specific topic.
Marketing is all about connecting to the minds and hearts of the audience you want to offer your services to. Brands in this digital are focused on how marketing works, how social media work, how emails work at the expense of how people work. Understanding how people work must be the basis of any good marketing strategy. To better explain this we could look at companies like Rolex. Rolex market their expensive products as precision timepieces but in all honestly does not tell time any better than R50 watch. This is accomplished simply because the brand has managed to connect with their audience at a deeper level. They took their time to understand and offer their client what they need. By communicating the invisible and stimulating their audiences auditory and optical senses this was possible.
Advertising can help us navigate the world. To better explain this, let us look at the scenario below;
Imagine you are in a store shopping for laundry detergent. For those that believe in the “I do not buy based on a brand, I buy based on what I believe” will likely be met with over 45000 different products in a regular store. Should you manage to navigate through the store and find the Isle with laundry detergents, the next challenge will quickly become the choice of detergent. This may sound simple enough but, the problem is that a regular human being cannot tell the strength of laundry detergent by just looking at it. We often use visual cues to choose the options that promise to clean our clothes better. The visual cues are the marketing itself.
This scenario greatly explains how marketing can help up navigate through the world with ease. The scenario shows that the marketer needs to understand that if they can appeal to our minds and heart they can definitely sell us anything.
In conclusion, we should understand that marketing in this digital age does affect our every decision. We do not necessarily have to notice that we are being advertised to, however, our unconscious minds notice. Marketers must understand that as much as marketing is evolving rapidly, the biggest question that must constantly be asked is, how do people work?
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