The Marketing Magic

Hello and welcome back to my blog! Today I wanted to discuss the magic of marketers and the wonders advertising can have on why and if we buy a product.

Remember these? Can you imagine this was all the craze at one point in time?

Its hard to think people were forking out money to buy these clunky shoes. How did we arrive at a point where we were willing to spend ay amount of money just to be able to afford these shoes? One word. Through advertising. Through this mean used by marketers we subconsciously believed these shoes were the only pair of shoes worth buying. We saw them everywhere! On magazines, on models, in pictures, on TV, in movies, on store posters etc... All strategically placed by marketers. However marketers weren't trying to create artificial needs, they were creating a demand for something we thought we needed and they provided the answer for that need! 

In the textbook Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having, and Being we learn that, "Marketers simply recommend ways to satisfy a biological need. A basic objective of advertising is to create awareness that these needs exist, rather than to create the needs." All products, from platform shoes to kleenex, are created to satisfy needs, what advertising does is communicate and create awareness that these needs exist and portray the product that will best satisfy this need. 

For many years there has been criticism about the influence of marketing in the consumption of goods, often deemed as evil doers and manipulators. Making us belief that if we don't have this product then we will not be happy enough or popular enough. It is important to understand the true effect marketing has. For many years fads and trends come and go but we can always rely on marketers revealing to us a new need we never thought we had and conveniently enough offering us the answer to this new found need.