Creating Perceptions Through Marketing – Part 4 – Turning Wants Into Needs

Successful marketers know that one of the most effective ways to get customers to spend money, time and energy consuming their products and services is to convince the customers that they need a particular product or service.  Most often they accomplish that by either creating a need where one did not exist before, or by turning a want into a need.  For example in 2011, Dove introduced a new deodorant purported to give women “softer, smoother underarms in just five days.” Hinging on the idea that women’s armpits are unattractive, the sales campaign for the product included ads portraying women joyfully cutting the sleeves off their shirts, as if they’d just been liberated from a shameful deformity and survey results asserting that armpit dysmorphia is a pervasive problem plaguing the majority of women worldwide.  By pinpointing a problem that most consumers didn’t even know they had, exacerbating anxiety about the problem, and then selling the cure, Dove’s powerful marketing formula successfully creates a need where one did not exist before.

The computer and mobile phone industries have been successfully turning wants into needs for decades.  People are really adamant about needing their computers and cell phones.  Remember when internet access used to cost like a hundred dollars a second, when you actually figured out what “Wi-Fi” meant, or when only grown-ups carried a cell phone?  I thought needs were about survival.  “Yeah,” people tell me, “I know.  I need them to survive.”  And they’re not kidding either.  Just try telling someone you’re taking his or her cell phone or computer away for the day and you’ll get one of two responses.  One is, “Oh Hell no, you’re not!”  The other is this unbelievably sad, scared look, that I think is best described as panic, sometimes followed by whimpering and, on occasion, cowering in a corner in the fetal position.  Ok, so we need them.  Why?  Because we’ve been told over and over that we do, we believe that we do, and so we do.

The pervasive message that marketers spend as much as $200 to $400 billion a year on, and bombard consumers over 3,000 times a day with, is, our lives, as they exist right now, are not enough.  We are not successful enough, pretty or attractive enough, or rich enough.  We don’t drive the right car, support the right cause, live in the right neighborhood, or eat the right foods.   We don’t smell right, don’t dress well, and we don’t belong to the right groups.  Our teeth aren’t clean enough, our clothes aren’t clean enough, and our houses aren’t clean enough.  We’re not efficient enough, productive enough, or well enough connected.  We need to work harder, exercise harder, and play harder.  We need to be better friends, better spouses, better parents, and better providers.  We need $1.5 million to retire, we need to take our families on vacations, and we need to pay for our kids’ 155 different activities. We need more money, more money, and more money.  And if we just had a little bit more money, more success, more status, more shoes, whiter teeth, if we just had the right product or service, our life would be nothing but sunshine and happiness, just like all of the excited, smiling people on the billboards and in the television commercials.

Our parents heard it before us, and their parents before them.  Our families are surrounded by it. It’s all around us, all the time. It is a never ending, around the clock message.  We are lacking, we’re not good enough, not yet.  Out with our friends and colleagues, at work, even at our schools and places of worship – we are bombarded by it.  And based on the figures, we’ve marketed the heck out of it, we’ve bought it, and we’ve even gone into debt for it.

 

Creating Perceptions Through Marketing – Part 1

Perhaps you’ve heard this one from David Foster Wallace.  I find it totally amusing.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Really quickly, think about what influences you when you are trying to determine your wants and needs?  Is it your biological needs, your family, your friends, the people at work, you spiritual community?  Perhaps it is your ever-growing social network, or perhaps it’s the government?  As I have mentioned already, and as I am sure you already know, our environment and community can have an enormous impact on our ability to change our behaviors or to grow economically.

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at an aspect of our culture that impacts all of our different communities. Marketing!  Over the next couple of posts we’ll dive more deeply into this topic and how it impacts us.

Before we dive right in, I feel that I must preface this section. The point here is not to place any sort of judgment or blame about the environment in which we live or the players involved in creating it.  Nor is it intended to prescribe measures to be taken to change it.  There are plenty of people out there who are infinitely smarter and more qualified than I, who have much better strategies and ideas about how best to change the environment in which we live.  The point of this discussion is merely to describe, as objectively and neutrally as possible, the “water” in which we all “swim” so that perhaps we may all begin to “swim” with a tab bit more awareness.

You, my friend, are being bombarded.  In 1971, the average American was subjected to approximately 560 advertisements a day.  Today, that number is over 3,000.   That’s over 1 million advertisements a year. In his book, “Buy – ology” Martin Lindstrom asserts that “by the time we reach the age of sixty-six, most of us will have seen approximately two million television commercials.  Time-wise, that’s equivalent to watching eight hours of ads seven days a week for six straight years.”

According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American, including children, watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, this so-called average person will have spent 9 years staring at a box.

In addition to the good ol’ day stand-bys of television and radio, we now have computers, the Internet, smart phones, cell phones, tablets and gaming devices.  Our televisions now frequently have 6 million channels and the Internet is open 24/7.  The plethora of places accessible to and frequented by marketers, advertisers and consumers alike is incredible.  And it continues to grow – fast.

Hold on, I know what you are thinking.  “But I record/TIVO most of my shows now and I can just skip over the commercials or I can just change the channel or get up and leave the room when commercials come on.”   Yes, we all use these little tricks in an attempt to escape the seemingly relentless grasp of advertisers, but guess what?  They know that we are skipping commercials and TIVO’ing shows.  They know we turn the channel or leave the room when commercials come on.  They know all of our tricks and they have ways around them.  For every new trick we come up with, they come up with another effective solution.

More to come…