Bang for the buck!!!

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits in and sells itself. People spend money when and where they feel good"

We live in a world of advertising. It is a world of our making, of course. The primary function of advertising is to persuade people to buy something. We don't like to pay the full price of things, so we allow other people to pay part of that price in exchange for letting them pass a message to us. So, open up the pages of our favorite magazine, and there are glossy ads for clothes, shoes, cars, or beer. We turn on the television, and smiling faces on television try to sell us soup, toothpaste, candy, and what not. Despite how much we think we ignore them, and how little we may believe they affect us, that's not necessarily the case.

The smart people who pay billions yearly for advertising think it influences our choices, to greater extend they do. I like certain products and dislike others even though I have never tried them. Some of this is due to advertisements I have seen or heard. Advertisement does have a powerful effect on the choices we make. So, why do we choose things just because we feel good about them?

The world is a busy place. It is hard for us to feel confident that we have all of the objective facts about anything, whether it is products, people, or choices of things to do. The problem is that we allow advertisers to have access to our mental world. They have paid for the opportunity to slip information to us about what feels good. That information ultimately affects the way we make choices, whether we know it or not.

I am so much obsessed with these child foods that I keep changing them every time. To be honest I get carried away by the colorful and promising ads. Well, which mother won’t want her ward to be taller, stronger and smarter??

The new technique is the image advertising, which gradually shifts our perception towards the brand. Gauging the effects image advertising has on us is made even more complex because these effects may not operate directly on the image of the brand itself. Image advertising may produce small, incremental differences in the image of a brand.

Other technique is User Advertising that focuses on people who use the brand. When these brands are advertised, the focus is very much on image of a brand that resembles us, or the type of person we aspire to be. Consumers seem to 'compare' themselves to the product images in advertisements. Exposure to beauty-enhancing products in advertisements lowered consumers' self-evaluations, much in the same way as exposure to thin and attractive models in advertisements has been found to lower self-evaluations.

Although people often focus on the negatives when they discuss the effects of advertising, it is important to note that advertising does have its positive side. In fact, some of our society's most important messages have come through advertising, like “Wear a Helmet while driving, educate a girl child, and Keep your City clean” etc. It allows the consumers to choose the products that are best for them.

Advertising can also be used to generate awareness among public that which product they use and to which product they can say no. It can also be used to educate people about certain diseases or danger. Advertising can also be used to inform public about social events like concerts and performances. Charities can use media to advertise about the illnesses and encourage people for donations. Social organizations and NGOs can use the mean of advertisement for promoting their campaigns. Seeking help through advertisement during epidemics or natural calamities can help a lot. 

Advertising exists because there's a product a company wants to sell and they want people to know about it so they can buy it. This much is obvious. We create a vision of ourselves living this idealized lifestyle, and then behave in ways that help us to realize the vision. The problem with this process is that the lifestyles most often portrayed, and ultimately referenced, are well beyond the means of all but a very small percentage and here advertisement manipulates our thinking and often we end up buying things which we do not need.

There are all kinds of ads, but in general they all aim to keep you from thinking and, instead, make your buying choices based on an emotional response. Basically, if you're not prepared to think—and you often are not when you're watching television or reading a magazine—you'll pretty much accept any suggestion if it is offered to you. Since you're being so passive, you may not even realize it’s happening. No ad is more effective than one that makes you feel something because emotions and memories are tightly linked.

Advertisements constantly demands our attention where ever we go. You switch on the TV ad there it is. Now a days I often wonder, do we watch programs between ads or vice versa? The kids gets so much influenced, that they hardly look at its worth. Just yesterday, my three old kid wanted a new  Mahindra TRUCK which is being advertised by Ajay Devgan (don’t know for what).

I feel advertising might not even promote choice after all. By subtly manipulating its audience, it may in fact stifle choice. Much of advertising is subliminal, drip-feed, all about creating positive associations without prompting conscious thought. If we consciously sat down and decided to objectively analyze whether we preferred Coke or Pepsi, we’d probably conclude that we didn’t care and that it doesn’t matter. An active choice, in this instance, is bad for the brand. Instead, advertising “operates darkly, beyond the light of consciousness”. In fact Intuitive brand judgments are made instantaneously and with little or no apparent conscious effort on the part of consumers.

Since we can’t do away with advertising, but we can surely examine it, ask more questions, regulate it better, and minimize its harmful effects on society. Let the intrinsic factors decide whether we want to buy the product or not. Advertising is important for a company to sustain itself in the competitive market but companies should follow certain ethics and a code of conduct in order to eliminate harmful effects of advertising. Choice is all about perception. The matter of choice is a groggy one. Evaluate all the alternatives.