Hi everybody! Welcome back to another blog post. I hope you are enjoying this holiday season. Although with all this time celebrating and less time studying, something has come to my attention: just how prevalent marketing and its strategies are in making a business succeed. Often, you may not even notice that something is meant to be an advertisement, and yet it may subconsciously place a brand in a higher standing for you. I hope for this to be a longer series as there is simply too much to fit into one post, so I hope you will follow along!!
The 4 P’s of Marketing
To understand how Marketing works, it is often broken into 4 simple sections: Products, Place, Price, and Promotion. Products focus on a brand having goods that customers need/want; place focuses on the ways a product is delivered to the customer; price emphasizes having the appropriate cost for the products; lastly, Promotion is centered on the strategies used to persuade customers to be interested in and want your products. Together, these concepts make a brand well known, desirable, and, in summary, successful. Todays blog post will mostly focus on the last: Promotion. Promotion may be made successful through social media, promotion sales, traditional ad’s ect.
Influencer Epidemic
First off, an Influencer is depicted as someone “who has become well known through regular social media posts and can promote a product or service by recommending or using it online” (Oxford Languages). That said, their whole job is to sell you on products and goods. Aswell as an interesting thing to notice is that their job is done completely “online,” meaning that the existence of this role is truly quite new. Many brands choose to work with influencers to attract a new customer base, create a loyalty and almost cult following around a brand, aswell as emphasizing and spreading a brand’s values.
However, having an influencer work with a brand is a risky venture, as, at the end of the day, these are people, too, and they also make mistakes. However, in being so high in social standing, these mistakes often snowball into larger problems, which rub off badly on a brand. This is especially prevalent with cancel culture running the internet in this era. Some famous examples may be Adidas and GAP losing millions after they worked with, and were associated with, Kanye West and the antisemitic comments he made.
While having influencers promote brands’ products is crucial these days to creating a reputable and recognizable brand image,e it comes with large risks of backfiring. Can you think of any influencewhoat is heavily associated with a specific brand?
Traditional Ad’s
If you think about it, the way brands market has drastically changed in the past decades. Traditional ads have existed since ancient Egypt, with wall drawings promoting small businesses. Today, though not as popular, traditional ads are still readily used and are still highly effective. Such ads may consist of billboards, newspaper columns, the radio, and direct mail. While they may seem outdated, they still target a very broad and diverse audience of people less informed and accustomed to digital media. That said, your parents or grandparents are more likely to prefer these more tangible advertisements as it resonates more with them and their experiences.
Some benefits of it may be a greater attachment to something tangible rather than fully digital, aswell as the number of people being reached by these advertisements is much greater. For instance, more people are driving on a highway and seeing a billboard rather than a YouTube ad. However, that is not to say it is without its drawbacks. Costs can be a large drawback, as it costs far more to print hundreds of paper flyers in comparison to running a digital ad. Aswell as it being far more difficult to target a very specific audience, you’ll instead have a very diverse one with messages that may not always resonate with everyone. What do you consider you see more of every day: traditional or digital focused adverstaisments?
In Summary
That all said I look forward to continuing this mini searies and diving deeper into the variety of marketting strategies out their as well as hearing everyones feedback.