What is marketing? Marketing is the promotion and selling of products or services through advertisements. As we saw through “Merchants of Cool,” the aspect of marketing is catching a trend when it’s there and convincing the consumer to buy the product without being too obvious. One way to accomplish this is by tricking the consumer into thinking that they are buying a product because they want it and not because the corporation wants them to get it.
Advertisements promote products by displaying other people, usually a celebrity, with their product. For example, a coke advertisement could display kpop sensation, BTS, drinking coke. When people watch the advertisement, they might feel the urge to drink coke. This phenomenon can be explained by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are cells in your brain that fire when you both act and watch someone else perform the same act. When you watch someone else drink coke, your neurons are activated and hence you feel the urge to drink coke too. Furthermore, if people are fans of the celebrity presented in the advertisement, they are even more likely to buy the product because they trust their idols - they have that sense of attachment. This is exactly what advertisers want to accomplish; they want people to relate or feel a connection to their ads.
By putting people in certain situations in their advertisements, producers can make the consumer unconsciously want to mimic those people, and therefore also want to use the product they are selling.
An interesting example of marketing was seen through the video that we watched in class with the girl who was completely obsessed with the Hunger Games. She was marketed to desire online points, and in her obsession with getting more points she literally did the marketers' jobs for them by constantly publicizing the Hunger Games on her social medias. This is an extreme example of modern day marketing through social media and other online platforms-- something that was not possible until recently (past few decades.)
ReplyDeleteI like how you connected marketing to the psychology of it. I took psychology last year and we learned about many of the same strategies you mentioned when studying behaviors. Seeing someone else wear, eat, or do something will make us more likely to copy their actions, especially if it is a celebrity or someone we idolize. I think endorsements have been one of the biggest marketing strategies in the last 10 or so years especially with the popularity of YouTube and other social media platforms.
ReplyDeleteI think that it is really interesting how marketers have begun to utilize psychology and science in order to convince their audience to buy their product. I really like that you explained how marketers are utilizing their knowledge mirror neurons to sell their product. I know that psychologists further enable marketers through fashion psychology.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you explained marketing in detail and how you were able to connect that to the documentary we watched, "Merchants of Cool". You example of coke helped be understand how marketers can use certain strategies such as utilizing celebrities to promote their product and at the same time the ads can unconsciously stick into the consumers brains.
ReplyDeleteWhat you said about celebrity-endorsed products brought me back to freshman year English class when we learned about ethos, pathos, and logos. Companies utilizing celebrities' powers over consumers is classified as ethos, since ethos is characterized by trustworthiness. Like you said, people have a "sense of attachment" to certain celebrities, and seeing a favorite celebrity using a certain product makes people who look up to that celebrity want to use that same product too. People figure that if an admired celebrity trusts a certain product enough to endorse it, then they themselves can trust that product as well.
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