Hello, fellow marketing bloggers!
I’m actually pretty excited about this assignment. First of all, blogging about marketing doesn’t involve debits and credits, or taking derivatives of anything. Second, I derive great pleasure (ha!) from knowing that someone will be reading whatever I’m typing (if only for that participation mark). And finally, this assignment will introduce me to something new: blogging. I’ve never blogged before. Now that I have my own blog account, it’s like owning a virtual piece of real estate. I’m feeling richer already!
Anyway, back to marketing. I’m waking up to the idea that marketing really is all around me. For example, a moment ago I typed I’m feeling richer already. And even before I typed the !, a woman’s voice inside my head said, You’re richer than you think.
That voice wasn’t my conscience yakking. No, that was the Scotiabank slogan. I don’t bank with Scotiabank, and I’ve never made any effort to remember their slogan. Yet there they are, inside my head. All it took was a trigger word – “richer” – and I’ve proven that their advertising efforts have worked, sort of. (By “sort of”, I mean that if their ads have fully worked I should be banking with them right now.)
So now I’m thinking about different trigger words – I’m not sure if there’s a formal term for those words in marketing, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough. One minute I would be trying to catch up on some reading, thinking Geez, this chapter is impossible to understand. But then – ding! – Impossible is nothing. Ok, Adidas, get out of my head. I can’t concentrate. Maybe I’ll try reading something easier… easy… Easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl. Ok, I give up. Clearly, marketing has a bigger effect on me than I’d originally thought. And clearly, someone’s been doing the herbal. Aaahh! That just popped into my head with “clearly”. I’m not making this up; I remembered all those slogans just now. Treat this paragraph of this post as my stream of consciousness talking, only with more punctuation.
The marketing campaigns of the above brands and companies have worked their magic on me, the consumer. They all have strong brand identities: it only takes a word or an emphasis on several words for me to recall their brand. I can recite jingles and phone numbers from radio advertisements, but I can’t seem to recall the lecture notes I took yesterday. Why? I’m guessing it’s because my notes haven’t gotten any reinforcement yet, while certain commercials are played repeatedly, insinuating themselves into my mind.
The ease at which I’m recalling key phrases from commercials is scaring me just a little. How far is marketing inside my head?