Why Marketers find it difficult to put themselves in the shoes of their customers
How knowing marketing gives you the immunity towards ads
If you’re working in the marketing industry, you might have seen someone coming up with an awesome marketing plan only to find out it doesn’t work as you expected.
There might be a lot of factors at play. But most of the time when marketers fall in love with the idea, they love the idea because they know marketing.
Knowing marketing is like having an immune system towards a virus. In this case, the virus would be advertisements or marketing campaigns.
After learning marketing and its strategies and tactics, you start to see why advertisements are showing what they are showing or saying what they are saying. You are not emotionally affected by advertisements easily anymore because you now have a ruler — the knowledge of marketing to measure whether the ad was good or not. If the ad was good, you will be impressed by it and if the ad was terrible, you might not say it out loud but you are screaming internally. If you feel the ad was racist, sexist, or unethical according to your beliefs, you might decide not to buy the product at all.
Ads don’t influence you easily anymore. They are just samples you can take notes of or implementations of knowledge you learned at school.
But people who are not familiar with the concepts and tactics of marketing doesn’t feel that way towards ads. They might have the thought of their own to consider which ads good and which ads not but their criticism wouldn’t be as constructive as that of marketers. In that way, the emotional effect marketing has on people who do not know about marketing is stronger.
As a creative, you might feel an ad where someone explains the benefits of the product is boring because you can google it right away but at the same time it just might be the thing someone wants.
The market is changing and people are changing. Marketing methods are changing. More and more people are aware of marketing practices. But there are still a lot of people, especially in 3rd world countries, who don’t care about whether the ad is creative or not. A creative and mysterious ad might work on some people and they might even think it’s a great ad and buy the product because of the ad. But some people will find it too complicated and might not understand the ad.
Know your brand. Know your audience. Conduct a proper research.
In the end, our clients want us to sells or increase the brand’s value.
