Bryce Blakely's Blog

It’s a halloween blogging extravaganza! Yup, two posts one day, setting precedents and taking names is what were all about in this blog. And today were taking Robert Hall’s name off the list of classmate’s blogs and talking about his post on the importance of brevity in modern marketing. Rob argues that because the advertising industry is over saturated as it is consumers have grown accustomed to tuning out an advertisement literally within seconds of becoming aware of it. Rob advocates not for increased grandeur or pizzaz in advertisements but rather making those first few seconds where your audience is actually paying attention as dramatic and attention-grabbing as possible.

I have to totally agree with Rob on this one from both a personal standpoint and on principle. I know from first hand experience that I will not care the second an ad starts. Its a preconditioned in me. That said it’s this preconditioning that creates a crucial opening for markets. Expectations are zero, if your ad opens with a car-crash all of a sudden the passive, half-perceptive viewer is now captivated and dare I say could even be interested in what is said/happens next. It doesn’t even have to be as dramatic as that though, point in cases the 2009 Miller Superbowl ads, here’s a compilation of all of them.

Also remember how expensive superbowl advertising is? Why not cut that $15 million spot into 30 separate pieces?

So this may be beating a dead horse here but I’ve always gone with a better safe than sorry policy when it comes to zombies. How often does it feel like those sons of guns just seem to get up after the main character has “killed” them in movies? Semi-effective analogies aside though I wanted to write this post about information gathering and modern marketing. In class I feel like we have often demonized information gathering as giant vulture-like corporations preying on the unsuspecting consumer mice. But what about the benefits?

Information gathering is a two way street and if anything can be said about the certainties of modern marketing it’s that you know the companies are listening. So why not use this information gathering as a consumer tool as well. I see information gathering as an outlet for consumers to voice their opinions about what they would like to see from companies and influence retail outlet locations. Information gathering is after all a strategy for companies to create more personalized effective marketing campaigns so why should it be a game of cat and mouse instead of an open dialogue. If you’re a serious consumer there are benefits to be reaped from voicing your opinion.

Let’s say you’re coming off what could’ve been one of the biggest box-office releases of the last decade, you’ve just created what’s sure to be a pop culture icon for years to come, and now you’re thinking how am I going to top this? Well if any of thats true you’d probably be Chitopher Nolan about a month after the release of The Dark Knight,  the second installment in Hollywoods latest re-vamped Batman movies. Plans have already been laid for a third film but how could it surpass the last? All the conditions were perfect for a classic, excellent writing, low expectations as a result of the first installment in the series, and the tragic death of Heath Ledger making The Joker the final character he’d ever portray. Batman 3 seemed like a daunting task. Now I’m not here to make predictions about the quality of the film but I am here to write about how Christopher and his PR team have definitely started off on the right foot with hyping up The Dark Knight Rises. 

Early in the Summer Warner Bros. launched the official Dark Knight Rises website which originally consisted of (much the public’s confusion) a blank webpage and an audio file of people shouting. You couldn’t help but think “Why isn’t my internet working? What do I have to download to see this webpage?”, and right there it’s evident just how brilliant this ad campaign was. You were thinking and you were intrigued. Where’d you go from there? A quick Google search would take you to the movies twitter and then eventually a massive collage image of the new villain Bain. You put in the time and effort (little as it was) and this felt like you’d just stumbled across something big. Discreet is exciting, I know I told my friends.

The modern consumer market is so saturated with brands, advertisement, and alternatives that shopping can almost feel like putting together a stock portfolio at times. You’re investing your image in a brand each time you chose to consume a product, you’re associating yourself with that brand and consequently that brands image. Ironically in most markets that brand’s image is determined based on the sort of people that would purchase said product. By extension then it stands to reason that associating yourself with a brand you are also identifying with a social group. The simplest example of this is the apparel market because when you buy apparel you are directly effecting your outward appearance which dictates people’s first perceptions of you as a person.

This is why in a modern market companies stand to benefit greatly from maintaining a perception of quality. Regardless of all the four factors effecting purchasing people are always looking for quality products, in most cases the only thing that effects this is price. It all depends on utility, quality or money saved. How can a modern business capture both markets, the thrifty and the people looking for the best of the best. It the age old quality-for-less conundrum and aside for the age old we’ll-just-turn-into-a-massive-chain mentality some companies are finding ways of doing it (or at least making consumers believe they are).

Companies like KidRobot, an apparel company, do it by offering a limited number of a certain product while maintaining a a low price. By limited quantity I mean there will only be 150 made of a certain model, ever. This means that despite the low price consumers will perceive a much higher quality in the product they are purchasing because of its scarcity. Using exclusivity to attain a larger market, who’d have thought?