Imagine this.. You’re hungry and have two restaurants to choose from. One of them looks chic and classy while the other one looks decrepit and almost ready to bite the dust with the next gust of wind. Which restaurant do you think you’ll go to?
This part of marketing is called communication. It could be planned or unplanned. Everything from the architecture of a building to the work atmosphere at a company communicates with a prospect client. Companies need to be wary of what messages are received by its audience in order to create a lasting impression.
Different from Communication is the concept of promotion, where the marketers make an effort to make their product known. Using different mediums like signboards, advertisements, print media and what not. Promotion is a very important skill and needs to be understood well in order for it to be useful. Companies often end up spending more money promoting the product than creating it. Companies use sales promotion and even celebrities to attract attention.
Companies may use the above mentioned techniques but they need to make sure what would create a lasting impression. Customers today are so overwhelmed by all the information about various products that they don’t have time to read all. They end up throwing the pamphlets in the bin without even reading. All unread mails about different offerings are simply sent to the trash folder. The excess of information has given rise to a situation where it has become almost impossible to get the customer’s attention.
Because of the above mentioned reasons, marketers need to spend time studying how people in their segment allocate their attention time. Marketers may use different strategies to draw attention like shocking stories, free offers and various other methods, but still the question of effectiveness remains. It is one thing to draw attention, but another to make people buy your product. Promotion thus should target not on how to get the attention, but on how to make people buy products!!
