Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Fear as a marketing tool

I had a discussion with a few coworkers the other day.
Somehow, the Y2K bug was brought into the conversation as the biggest marketing ploy ever. (Enjoy this bit of fear propagation by Spock himself.)
All its success was based on the primal instinct of fear.
One of them later proclaimed emphatically that fear is the biggest marketing tool.

After some thought, I tend to agree on the whole.
Next to, of course, lust and love (http://marketing-bee.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-up-heat.html).

Do you drink beer?
Heard of Miller Light?
Seen their ads recently? (Example: Skirt, Carry-all)

Clearly this plays on the self-esteem issues that men have (yes, men have that).
Appearing unmanly in front of the "boys" is a huge fear factor.
The general consensus is that light beers are enjoyed more by the ladies.
And it is often depicted as the burly men drinking the hard liquor or darker beers.

What Miller Light as done here is taken a different spin on the problem by shifting the focus to the taste instead of light beer vs regular/dark.
Clever.
Not directly addressing the main issue of what is deemed "unmanly" behaviour.

Actually, these lite guards are very beautiful.
Snagged from here.


Monday, August 1, 2011

golden apple

It seems that everything Apple touches now turns to gold.
This was found here.

The above pictures were spotted here.

To keep up with demand, Foxconn (the Chinese manufacturers of iPhone; and yes, your iPhones are made in my glorious motherland by unfairly-treated and overly-stressed workers) are planning to hire 1 million robots to work in their plants. Talk about robotic armageddon eh?
But that's beside the point.

What I want to talk about today is the disillusioned people that are nonsensically buying into this apple plot to take over the world.

Let's not talk apples for now, and focus on oranges.
Imagine walking into a dealership and you see someone insistently asking for a particular car.
"I want that new car I heard so many great things about. I don't care whether it's a v4 or a v6. Horsepower is irrelevant. I just want it because it's the latest thing"
Sounds stupid right?

I get furious and irate when I hear people say, "I want a new phone - oh, maybe I'll just wait for the iPhone 5 and get that". It's insane, these people doesn't even know how the phone looks like (let alone the phone's innards) and they are sold on the idea of purchasing it already.

Frankly, there are many, many phones out there that are equally good as (if not better than) the iPhone 4 and people still mindlessly get drawn in by the whole distortion field.

But this also brings up a very valid point in consumer behaviour. This is a case in point for the emotional aspect of the purchase decision-making process. Consumers (particularly the ones highlighted in this article) are ingrained with strong emotional ties to the brand and the product. It is this emotional attachment that can cause the purchase decision to be heavily influenced by the emotional processing centre of the brain rather than the rational centre.

This also can be seen in car sales.
The whole purpose of the test drive to allow you to get emotionally attached to the car. The idea of ownership and envisioning yourself driving/owning the vehicle can be a strong subconscious leveraging point even most sales people aren't aware of (I may revisit this idea with an interesting article).

In hindsight, apple deserves to the top dog. Utterly brainwashing people into believing their elegant design and unique (read: enclosed and dictatorial) ecosystem is worth the premium you are paying (not only that but you're getting a good deal).

/Apple rant