Blog Post #12: It's Everywhere

Most weeks my topics for this blog are based loosely off of subjects that we have covered in my marketing class during the previous week. However, I am going to take a different approach this week since for the past week we have been working on shooting and editing video for a social awareness project about sustainability. When done with this video, the goal is to talk about how we created value, how we are targeting consumers, etc. with the video. I think that it will be more relevant to discuss this when the video is actually complete and I can post it on the blog and discuss it at length.

What I think would be interesting to do, since I am approaching the end of my marketing class, my spring semester, and my junior year, is to have a brief discussion about what I think marketing is all about and what it means to me. My hope is that this will spur a discussion within and between all of you that are reading this blog, to think about what marketing is to you. If you have kept up with my blog for the past three to four months, I hope that I have been able to equip you with some tools to aid you in thinking about this topic. So without further ado, here is a little about what marketing is to me.

Marketing is all about creating some sort of value for consumers. It is about addressing their needs, wants, and desires. Everything that you buy, from insurance to toothpaste, is purchased in order to address these needs, wants, and desires. So marketing is all about showing consumers not only that they want this iPhone, but also that they need this iPhone. The question is, though: how do you do this? How do you get consumers to buy your product that may or may not be similar to your competitors’?

This Apple iPhone advertisement is about a lot more than the phone itself. What do you see?

The answer to this question is that you do not try to get consumers to buy the product itself. You get them to buy into the values of your company. You get them to buy into what the product represents. If you are successful in this, then customers will not only buy your products, but they will buy into your products. If you are very successful in getting consumers to buy into the values that your products represent, they will continue to buy your products. Think about it, why do you buy the brands that you do? What do you think when you see a Samsung TV versus a Mitsubishi TV? This may not seems like it matters all that much, but it does.

Samsung and Mitsubishi TVs, although they may look very similar, convey very different sets of values

To emphasize this point further, I would like to extend the concept of marketing to a personal level. You may not think about it like this, but every day of your life you are marketing yourself. When you go about your daily life and make your own decisions, they reflect what you value. These decisions say everything about who you are. Other people then notice these decisions, and if they buy into what you represent and what you value, these people become your friends, acquaintances, and employers even. Think about how you market yourself and how your values align with people that you are close friends with versus people that you are not the biggest fan of. This all relates to how you market yourself and how others market themselves.

Whether you realize it or not, marketing impacts our lives every single day. Forms of marketing can be seen almost everywhere we go, and not just in the obvious ways like with advertisements. These are ideas that have been shaped throughout my life but have really taken form throughout my past semester at Saint Michael’s College. It is what I believe to be true, and whether or not your believe them to be true, I hope that they at least make you think about how every decision that you make in your life affects yourself and others.