Author: Tannisha Avarrsekar As the Editor-in-Chief of an online news agency, I have spent a significant amount of my time interacting if not interviewing a wide range of people. As a political strategy & communications consultant I now cultivate my insights from these interactions to advise my clients on how to conduct themselves during such […]
‘Advertising troubles both sociologists and financial directors: the former because they think it works, the latter because they think it does not,’ says Byron Sharp. The question of whether to advertise or not is especially a concern in today’s times when the results may not be seen immediately. Unfortunately, this can’t be directly measured since advertising has a long-term impact and the drop in sales is not immediately noticeable – over a period of time, it impacts a consumer’s ability to recall. Advertising works like the engines of a flight: while the engines are running, everything is fine, but when the engine stops, the descent eventually starts. The bigger the brand, the more it has to spend to appeal to a larger number of consumers across various occasions to keep a threshold recall for their market share to hold.
This is the most important advice I can provide from my experience as a marketer and a businesswoman. The complexities of business can drag us into paralyzing debates and prevent us from looking at the final beneficiary of all our efforts – the consumer. It is not what the company can offer, what it can manufacture efficiently, what satisfies the manager’s objectives, what makes great financial sense or what the boss’s wife needs … but what the consumer needs. Sometimes, the need is explicit and sometimes it has to be mined for, uncovering the consumer’s complex motivations, while sometimes it’s ambiguous and needs to be clarified and sometimes it’s just not there and manufacturers create a need. A need has many avatars. And while success can take diverse shapes at the end, a need is a necessary and enabling condition for it. Consumer need clarifies the business’s purpose, defogging the glasses of confusion. But it can be easily forgotten.
When we speak about the market dynamics and the consumption behaviour, there needs to be a deep understanding about the difference between shopper vs consumer. Generic marketing will draw upon consumer insights that relate to the perception of the product and the likeability of the product depending on product attributes.