When selecting a marketing strategy and the necessary philosophy and intellectual pursuit behind choosing a selling strategy to launch a successful marketing campaign that will sell products and services, you will have to select what methods you are prepared for as a seller and a marketer to live with.
Whether the strategy affected or damaged your personal brand or the products you hope to sell to consumers. Examples of marketing philosophy in this chapter will cover anti-marketing, negative marketing and stealth marketing.
They will also include real-world examples, which readers can view for themselves in the real world. Marketing and sales are a part of everyday life; whether or not we appreciate the fact or try to ignore it, to accomplish anything, there must be a monetary cause or a philanthropic behind any endeavour to be successful.
To be successful in marketing and generating the necessary sale, any writer or individual wishing to sell products or services must understand the nature of human beings. You will find very few communists and socialists in sales due to the environment requiring a strong element of realism.
This is not to criticise academia or other intellectual pursuits of the mind but in marketing, and these endeavours will require understanding human nature.
What is Meant by Philosophy and Intelligentsia?
Behind any marketing strategy, there is a great deal of research going into understanding target audiences and the nature of the people buying, people reading, and people consuming various products, which has led researchers to make deductions by looking at human psychology and employing knowledge of human behaviour into selling products more effectively to the people.
An example of this can be seen in the marketer and author Seth Godin’s philosophy of the Purple Cow. This is where a product must be adaptable and offer the customer benefits.
This intellectual and practical philosophy goes into the product that Seth Godin likes to promote with his marketing strategies offering the customer meaning.
This can be demonstrated in the legacy of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who revolutionised society, whose understanding of marketing and what users want from products brought society the first smartphone and tablets.
This adaptability and adding features can help create a great marketing strategy for writers. The smartphone is not a phone; it is the sole sum of human knowledge, a camera and many other appliances in a handheld device.
If you can have a product with this kind of utility and then apply this to a marketing strategy, you will have a successful product that sells.
What is Anti-Marketing
When Anti-marketing is a solid strategy that goes against traditional conventions of marketing and instead makes fun of traditional advertisements with a tone of self-awareness with sarcasm, please be aware that some readers or viewers viewing sarcastic content may not understand.
When writing copy for online magazines or scripts, sarcasm, humour, and other cultural nuances may not translate well to a general audience due to different dialects, cultures, and micro-cultures within societies.
Also, there is autism to be aware of as well, which is also causing people who use social media, which requires the use of text which in the context has no nuance, which can cause people to have autistic symptoms or be unable to see the funny side regards to marketing.
Ultimately, marketing attempts to connect with customers and let them in on the inside jokey. For example, yes, indeed, the advertisement is about selling. When using humour as an advertising and marketing strategy, try to be aware of cultural sensitivities.
This can also be internal sensitivities as writers and marketers depending on your chosen profession, which can either be more related to the writing side and not necessarily more business side of marketing is that any written content you must first sell the body of work to internal stakeholders, managers and team leaders so there will be an element of office politics which can either be negative or positive depending upon your organisational culture.
Either way, regarding what may happen as long as the work sells, there should hopefully be few complaints. With modern technologies such as online and Google Analytics, the marketing team can easily gather data on any written content and how well it engages with potential customers.
What is Negative Marketing
Negative marketing is typically something that taps into the part of the human brain that assesses threats, weaknesses or anything negative because it is part of human nature. According to evolutionary psychology, humans seek the negative over the positive.
Human beings do this historically to survive and overcome adversity also; this means human beings are drawn to negative information, not quality of information, as can be seen in modern news media being predominantly negative because negative news stories sell more newspapers and lead to more viewership than positive news stories people don’t want to hear about good news.
This can also be seen in the way politics is run in the USA and the United Kingdom, with the major political parties of Republicans, Democrats, Labour, and Conservatives speaking predominantly about the negative sides of the opposite party because it is more efficient and people take this information in a lot easier than positive information.
Also, as human beings, we typically, according to the modern Wisdom Podcaster this Chris Williams human beings look for information and facts that support our worldview and other beliefs regarding news content and online information.
It goes even deeper than that when you are online, companies use online data to create a browsing experience that suits the customer’s needs, so if you type negative content, you will receive that which you search.
For example, if you type in hardwoods or sexualised images will start to receive this information in going into your Google browser, which is even more apparent on YouTube because the platform will send you information and content that already feeds the user’s interests and biases.
Negative marketing feeds on the ugly side of human nature. It is what provides people like Andrew Tate, an online influencer, the means to become rich and famous because he presents a negative attitude to women, feeds the negative biases of sexless men in their teens and 20s, and this is a negative feedback loop that feeds Andrew Tate brand and makes him richer. This can be seen again in the Fresh and Fit Podcast, Fox News and CNBC.
What is Undercover Marketing
Undercover marketing is also sometimes known as Stealth Marketing, where marketers disguise themselves as peers of the target audience.
This can be demonstrated in the 2002 Sony campaign, where actors were hired around cities asking strangers to take photos with them.
A perfect example I have recently seen of stealth marketing is when Emma Darcy and Olivia Cook, who play Rheanyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower in the spin-off TV show Game of Thrones, which hired from 2010 until 2018 and its successor show the House of the Dragon, launched in 2022.
During the marketing for the TV show, Emma Darcy and Miss Cook showed great sales ability in promoting the show by not talking about the TV show; please view this clip where you can see clearly what these two actresses were doing was a perfect example of Undercover Marketing which is also sometimes referred to as Anti Marketing(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bntzdxHIixE&t=126s).
The Fundamentals of Marketing Philosophy
As customers become more business savvy and aware of the influences of big tech on their purchasing choices, our outside stimuli are changing the marketing environment from an outbound marketing strategy that large companies in the 1950s towards inbound marketing strategies.
An outbound marketing strategy is typically billboards, TV ads and any marketing material you will find out in the streets through your letterbox or anything directly or indirectly being sold to yourself without you first looking for the product.
Inbound marketing strategies are where the marketers try to build meaning concerning the product they wish to sell, and they focus on not telling customers what to buy but why they should buy the product due to it fulfilling their needs.
An easy example to understand inbound marketing is to think of Podcasters selling products on their TV shows when they have built a sufficient audience and developed trust and emotional connections with their listeners or viewers.
They leveraged this trust to create a sales funnel with their audience due to establishing legitimacy.
These kinds of inbound strategies are more effective than outbound marketing tactics because, with these tactics being used for over 70 years, we have become numb to their effects often you truly listen to online advertisements, TV advertisements or billboards.
However, with this being the case, there are still fundamental concepts that will always be relevant to marketing strategies: The production Concept, Selling Concept, Marketing Concept, Social Marketing Concept (Societal Marketing Concept), Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process (or Positioning), Physical Evidence (or Packaging).
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