Dissonance between Marketers’ Perception and Consumers’ Reality
November 19th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing
A very interesting study by x+1 and Research Now in late 2013 in the paper The Marketer’s Playbook: Aligning market strategies with consumer expectations was detailed in E Marketer recently. This paper was extremely useful in squashing some myths and reinstating some age old beliefs.
Unlike the bad reputation that banner ads get from marketers, customers actually rank banner ads as one of the top 3 most important factors when making a purchase decision, one of the later stages in the consumer decision journey. Also, while marketers may get carried away by the use of social media for marketing, they shouldn’t forget the benefits of the age old, seemingly staid email marketing which the highest proportion (16%) of the consumers believe that is the MOST VALUABLE marketing channel!
Also, while marketers may highly value mobile ads, mobile applications and SMS as valuable marketing channels, the percentage of consumers who believe the same is much, much less. For example, 35% of marketers believe that mobile apps are valuable but only 5% of consumers believe the same. However, this is not to say that marketers are wrong, it may just mean that consumers are probably unaware of what marketing influences them the most. They may also not want to admit for example that mobile apps are in fact effective. However, whatever the situation may be, this again highlights that big spends on emarketing should only be done after carefully analysing the situation and being aware of the possibility of being influenced by the shiny object syndrome.
