The Fierce Driver of Sales- Marketing

April 4th, 2012 • 1 comment Uncategorized

I read Wei-Ting’s first blogpost way back in September and it has stayed in my mind ever since. Each time I think about marketing and especially the millions of dollars that are pumped into various campaigns throughout the world to increase sales and profits, I used to initially cringe. Wei-Ting had wittily thrown the question at us about if the marketers are really encouraging consumerism or is it our fault that we satiate so many of our wants and fall prey to the marketer’s charms. I always kept the belief that if we as consumers need something, then we will ask. Only then I believed, the marketers had any responsibility to lure us to buy their specific product. Coming up with some vague new product with an exorbitant price tag and then trying to sell it to us was in my opinion, not only ineffective but very risky and irresponsible as well. As with advertising for mature products, I always believed that since we are already aware of the product, what is really the point of it? I know for a fact that I always keep a couple of cans of coke at home and I believe that an extra, exorbitant 30 second spot will not influence me in any way. Why then, I felt, do they not cut down 0n promotional costs (which make up a huge portion of product costs) and reduce both the price of the product and maybe even their profit margin by virtue of the increased volume of sales?

But then, a number of things happened at the same time. Firstly, regarding my perception about promotions of new products, I came about this famous quote by Henry Ford in Steve Jobs’ biography. Loosely paraphrased it said that if we ask people what they want, they will say faster horses and not cars. And then, who can forget about all the innovations that came about as a result of “thinking differently” at Apple? I realized then that there indeed was merit for not just doing market research and finding what people want, but instead innovating and preemptively solving people’s issue or making people’s lives easier before they realized it. As far as marketing for mature product goes, Jenny talked about tons of companies that used marketing to turn around their fate and stop their declining sales trend. Arm & Hammer’s example really stuck with me and showed me the true power of marketing and promotions. It is true that find the ROI on marketing is difficult but examples like A&H showed the silent but fierce power of marketing and as I reach the end of the term, I have immense regard for marketing, much more regard than what I had at the beginning of the term.