Marketing and Advertising – Great love needs a nudge or two

Some love stories in the 21st century aren’t exactly like a tragic Romeo and Juliet tale. Many of them are between humans and objects! 

“I love my iPhone.”

“I love Baskin Robbins.”

“I love the Zomato app.”

You get the drift.

With our primary role in the world becoming that of ‘consumers’, the biggest love story can be found at the beginning of this consumption process, when individuals meet and connect with their dream brand. While this meeting might seem like a chance encounter to the consumer, us marketing and advertising professionals know the time, effort, and previous heartbreaks that led to the beginning of this love story. The marketer has lived through hours of painstaking customer persona creation, needs analysis, brand building and user experience study. The advertiser has taken these inputs to make that eyeball-intriguing advertisement that (hopefully) leads to the final sale or at least garners interest in the brand’s product.

Marketing and advertising are, thus, the two nudges every consumer is given before they can fall in love with any product or service.

So, wait, aren’t marketing and advertising the same thing? Aren’t they just interchangeable words that help communicate your brand story? Not at all! 

What do Marketers do?

Let’s explain this with an example. Say you are an EV bike manufacturer. You can’t just make an EV bike and expect people to buy it. So what do you do? Here’s where the marketing team takes over, and the following is a simplified process of what they do.

1. Target group analysis: Find out who would be interested in buying an EV bike. Run surveys, look at online groups and forums, conduct market research.
2. Customer personas: Divide your audience into discrete personas and give them names. Shreya is environmentally conscious and wants to buy an EV to reduce her carbon footprint. Rodney doesn’t mind either petrol or EV bike, but he is a big fan of Made in India products. Pradish wants to own the latest gadgets, and electric is the newest buzzword that has caught his attention.
3. Needs analysis: Identify what Shreya, Rodney and Pradish would typically want from their EV bike. If your product has it (e.g., “0-100km in 5 secs!”), they need to be glorified. If they don’t, how can you convince your customer that you’ll either have it in the next phase of launch (e.g., model with more storage space) or that the product is excellent without it anyway (e.g., “No need for battery swapping feature because the bike charges are lesser than an hour”)
4. Conversations: Each of the above are conversation points that you can have with your customer – through blogs, answering questions on Quora and Reddit, showing how your product works on Youtube videos, getting the company’s founders to talk about their vision of a clean and green India, etc. 
5. Brand building: Over time, a brand is built with a consistent voice and personality.

This is marketing!

So then what do Advertisers do?!

Your customer doesn’t have time to learn everything about your EV bike by scouring through forums, YouTube channels, newspapers, and digital media. How do you tell them your brand and product exist in 10-30 seconds? How do you make them believe your EV bike is the best bike out there between overs in an IPL match? How do you get imprinted in their brains before they skip your ad on Youtube so that they still remember you when they finally decide to buy an EV bike? Welcome, advertisers. Advertisers have to impact people’s minds in very little time significantly. They use all the inputs given to them by the marketing team and convert it into something memorable. The success of any advertising campaign depends on timely offers, creative positioning, and catchphrases that resonate with consumers.

Quality marketing efforts help consumers make informed decisions before purchase and make them stick around for a while with data-driven customer service after the sale. The goal of good advertising is to break through the noise of “me, me, me” and plant the seeds for a new customer to become one or encourage a repeat purchase with excellent offers. 

An intelligent brand does both marketing and advertising. Together, they can accomplish great things. Together, these cupids bring love into all consumers’ lives. Your’s, mine, all of us!