How important is marketing? I'm a consumer. For me, I often feel like advertisements aren't doing their job when I watch them. Despite what psychology might say, I usually don't feel like I want to buy a product just because I hear about or see it a lot. I'm never giving my full attention to commercials or ads. I've always wondered: is marketing actually effective? How important is it to a business?
It can be assumed marketing is pretty important, or else companies wouldn't spend millions, even billions, of dollars on advertising. The general goal of marketing is to promote something, increase engagement, and ultimately increase sales of the good or service. Outbound marketing, also called interruption marketing, involves promoting a product through continuous advertising. The marketer talks to the consumer. Inbound marketing involves attracting a consumer, such as bringing them to a company's website, but primarily it focuses on keeping and increasing the business of an already active consumer.
For decades, advertising usually meant TV, radio, print, and billboards. The consumer was bombarded with ads, the brand constantly shoved in their face-- pure outbound marketing. Companies used to use all these forms of advertising because they were not sure which worked best. It was difficult to measure their effectiveness. However, with real time data from the digital age, measuring the efficacy of marketing is now much clearer and easier.
When companies begin thinking about marketing, they must have a marketing campaign and decide how they will measure success. The short term and long term increases in revenue are generally the indicators of success, though the latter may be more difficult to measure.
What actually leads to that success? Psychology has plenty of answers. Priming is a term that refers to when exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus. When used in marketing, it could cause consumers to remember information better, and might influence their buying behavior. There is also something called decoy pricing, or the decoy effect, which changes a consumer's perspective of price. For example, many products' prices end in .99: $4.99, or $49.99 for example. We see the 4 and 49 in front, instead of 5 or 50, and we might think of it as cheaper than it really is. Additionally, due to the limited amount of space in our short term memory, humans tend to cluster similar information together. An effective ad or marketing strategy would present information in a way that would cause a consumer to make associations, cluster information, and overall remember their brand or product.
There are many other psychological techniques used in marketing as well. This aspect of advertising is crucial for companies to consider. Marketing involves a great deal of planning and analysis, and brands often consider it critical. According to psychology, marketing is fairly significant.
Sources
https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/psychology-marketers-revealing-principles-human-behavior
In today's world marketing is becoming more difficult. Since the average person is used to many different types of advertising companies have to become more lucrative to market their products. People working in marketing have to constantly change and adapt their strategies to get customers. It is a difficult field to work in.
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