By Don Williams
In today’s fast paced tech-infused world, the number of options available for marketing your product or business are almost as diverse as the amount of products on the market! While 100 years ago, you might of had a few options such as print, door to door, and word of mouth. That’s it.
Today, since business is more complex, there are exponentially more ways to market your business. While we aren’t going to discuss the the specific types of marketing, we will be talking about why it is irrelevant which tools are being used now, and in the future.
Yes, it matters in regards to volume. If people stopped reading newspapers altogether tomorrow, due to technology, then obviously you’d want to stop using print ads. What we’ll focus on is, for example in the above situation, why you can take you print ad, edit it slightly and still have a successful marketing strategy with any new tool.
Reason #1: People are People are People
5,000 years ago, males sold their potential mates on their resilience and strength which in turn improved the odds for her offspring to have those same qualities. The same sales techniques used back then are still the same underlying methods that modern marketers use today.
People don’t change like our technology does. Think about it. Walk down a residential street and look around. Is it really that different than what it would have looked like 5,000 years ago? Not really. We just have bigger huts, we developed some roads and mechanized horses (cars), but essentially, we all still want and need the same things as our primitive ancestors.
We need love, security, substantial relationships, etc. See Maslow’s Hierarchy for more information about this. These needs tie in directly to what marketers for all of time have tried to infiltrate and fill. The sale is made via trust.
Reason #2: Non-Essentials Change but Essentials Don’t
For forever, people will need food, water, clothing (if we want to live in cold temperatures), some sort of shelter, love and contribution. Marketing methods may jump from the newspaper to twitter to highway billboards, but these ads (if good)will always have one or more of these essentials.
Consider Apple. One of their marketing campaigns consisted of TV commercials featuring not their computer, but of the great accomplishments that humans have made throughout history. They connected the essential human desire for contribution and greatness to their product, even though their product had nothing to do with any of the people in the commercial!
People will jump from non-essentials like MySpace and Facebook, but they won’t ever stop desiring the need to communicate. Are you getting it? We’re focusing in on the root human desires that we should target in our marketing campaigns.
Reason #3: Food, Sex, Entertainment and Excitement
Take a look around, and you’ll notice that along with a huge number of products and services revolving around these 4 things, the marketing tactics used with these triggers are used for everything and anything. Take Godaddy’s Superbowl ads of the scantily clad women (sex), or the mashup of 1080’s from Shaun White (excitement) or the Dominoes commercials where they show mouth-watering pizzas (food.
Hopefully you get it. Cater to the deeply rooted human desires within the unconscious mind, no matter how illogical, and use any tool you’d like and watch the dough roll in.