Brighter Marketing

My 12 year old daughter is writing adverts in her English class for a new brand of sweets they have designed. She has told me all about how they have defined their target market and designed a poster to advertise the new sweets with a great strap line that makes the reader find out more about the new sweets. I was impressed by their efforts and was amazed by what a young mind can do without the years of baggage about how marketing should be done is carried around by most of us.

However, she wasn’t so sure what she had done was “right” and asked me “What is marketing? Is there any secret advertising stuff I should know about that I can use to make the poster better?”

The answer to the first part of the question “What is marketing?” threw me a little bit and I was about to go into some long complicated answer about the types of marketing, when I stopped myself . I realised that marketing is essentially

“Finding out what people want (emotionally) and giving it to them”

If you know the real reasons why someone wants to buy your product or service then you are halfway to getting them to buy. For example, no one buys a BMW simply because they want to get from A-B. They buy it for a whole host of reasons such as gaining prestige, makes them feel good, makes them look important etc etc. We buy chocolate mainly to satisfy some emotional need, to make us feel less stressed, treat ourselves, or make ourselves feel better. The we all justify the purchase with logical reasons such as fuel efficiency or that we were hungry, but deep down the real reason we  have bought the BMW or the chocolate will have it’s basis in emotion.

And as for the second part of the question “Is there any secret advertising stuff I should know about…” the answer is yes and and the answer again is emotion. If you want to get people to act on your marketing, get them to elicit an emotion and then hit them with a strong call to action. Give them a reason to get in touch with you and let them know what’s in it for them.

If you want to know more about marketing and basics around how emotion works, the you could take a look at The Brighter Marketing Bible which we recently published. You can buy it off Amazon but if you want a sneak preview you can download two free chapters which cover Direct Mail and Emotion in Marketing.

Or take a look at some other of our blog posts associated with emotion in marketing

http://brightermarketing.com/blog/category/emotion-in-marketing/