As the midterm approaches, I thought it would be good practice to look at the blog of my other colleagues and try to apply the marketing concepts that we’ve learned in class. In my search for this, I came across Alex Joshi’s blog post entitled “You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet”, which talks about how marketing dictates the identity of a person and actually shapes or define who you are. Alex argues that marketing strategy and a product defines a person.
However, I beg to differ since in my opinion, a person’s personality causes him to fall prey to such marketing strategies. Given our discussion of STP, marketers use different marketing strategies to target people using different bases which includes demographic, psychographic geographic and product. Based on our lecture, the psychographic base of segmenting market groups consumers according to their self-values, self-perception as well as their lifestyle. For example, A health consious individual believes in fitness and in health, sees himself as a healthy individual thus engages in an active lifestyle. All of these are the characteristics of a particular consumer. The marketing strategies simply uses these characteristics to tailor products and services to such individuals.
With that said, marketing does not really define a person contrary to what Alex was proposing. However, these people submit to such marketing strategies as a result of their personality and characteristic as an individual.
Marketing Simply Mirrors Who You Are
The main point: it’s the other way around, people define themselves, mayketing just echoes this self perception of these people.