Marketing strategies for products in today’s world can be remarkably diverse, and remarkably detached from the nature of the product being advertised. With marketing having been honed to near scientific levels by years of study, it is possible to determine methods of marketing that take advantage not of the positive traits that a product offers, or of the negative traits that a competing product suffers from, but instead of simple psychological elements of the audience member or the viewer. For all that these strategies clearly seem to offer a fair degree of success, one cannot help but wonder at the sustainability of the marketing techniques, however. They depend on viewer ignorance of their efficacy; if the audience member can understand the manipulative device being employed by the marketing he or she is viewing, then he or she will be much less likely to be affected by it, and will in fact instead likely become angered by such blatant attempts at manipulation.
No better example immediately stands out than the simplistic and very blatant marketing technique of using on-screen messages while a viewer is watching a popular show. Essentially, passing off small messages in the corner of the screen as a kind of during-show commercial is a popular marketing tactic used by television networks in order to promote other shows on the same channel. This technique is not even used in a potentially information-disseminating way; while sometimes the on-screen blurbs will inform the viewer of whatever show is on next, many times the on-screen blurbs will be alerting the viewer of events a week or more away. Beyond the simplistic fact that commercials in between segments of the show being watched are the preferred times to encounter such information, viewers do not like being distracted during the show by such an obvious attempt at manipulation.
It is an obvious attempt at marketing and manipulation, as well, if only because of the simple fact that the human eye is drawn to new images and shapes appearing on the screen. This is a simple marketing gimmick that is employed far too often, and is becoming more and more despised by viewers. Presumably, the tactic still encounters a fair amount of success, if only because if it didn’t, one would assume that the networks would cease to employ such a marketing strategy. But there will presumably come a time when viewers will no longer stand for such a marketing ploy, if only by seeking out forms of media that do not require encounters with that kind of marketing.
As an instance in recent times of the failure of this type of marketing strategy, take the use of a countdown clock during an episode of Lost on ABC. The countdown clock stood over the logo for the TV show V, which was returning that same night, at the end of the countdown. The marketing tactic seems, at first glance, to be a solid way to build up viewer interest in the show, while also providing information as to the show’s actual airing time. But instead, all it does is distract from the show being currently watched; in this case, it was distracting from Lost, one of ABC’s more successful and long-running shows. It seems like a mistake to employ a marketing technique that would require a viewer to turn attention away from a successful show in order to promote a new show. Perhaps the theory behind the marketing technique is that the viewer will come to associate the success of the one show, Lost, with the quality of the new show, V, in this case. The attempt at forcing the viewer into associating the two shows together, however, seems faulty at best. Instead, the viewer is much more likely to simply become angered at both shows, and at the network in general.
There are often side effects to these kinds of marketing strategies; unintended consequences which may or may not be positive for the marketers. In the above instance of on-screen messages during shows, one of the unintended consequences used to be heightened purchase of DVDs. After all, if you spend the money on DVDs, then you can watch a show without worrying about commercials or on-screen messages of any kind. You can avoid all of the negative marketing strategies and tricks that so plague regular TV viewing. So, in a way, this could end up creating profit for the network. But, with increasing prominence of Internet sites, allowing easy access to TV shows, this seems to be a changing trend. Now, you can watch many TV shows on Hulu, for free, with only a few brief commercials in between shows. Attempts at marketing on Hulu are often remarkably discrete; present, but not distressingly so. As more and more shows reach the same status, viewers will tend to veer away from watching them on television, where the chance to encounter distracting and manipulative marketing tactics is still quite high, and will instead begin watching on their computers.
It is almost unavoidable that any given marketing technique will have unintended consequences. After all, for all that marketing has been studied intensely, there is no definitive guide on how best to market something to a human mind. That being said, however, it seems that certain more prominent and loud forms of marketing have a tendency to incur a greater risk of backfire and unintended consequences than others. The on-screen marketing seen during Lost is such a kind of marketing, because of how it interrupted and distracted from a prominent show, even without being terribly forward about it.
Another example of a recent marketing strategy potentially gone awry in recent memory is that of the marketing strategies employed to advertise a video game, Dante’s Inferno, based on the poems of the same name by Dante Alighieri. The game, which revolves around a descent into Hell, seemed to lend itself towards marketing based on a similar theme. EA, the publishers of the game, employed a marketing strategy in which they attempted to create stunts using each of the 7 deadly sins, in order to better sell the game. Some of these stunts included sending $200 checks to prominent video games journalists, in order to represent the sin of greed; encouraging gamers to take pictures of “acts of lust” with attractive women while at the San Diego Comic-Con, in order to win a contest which featured “a sinful night with two hot girls” as a prize; and sending a prominent video game journalist a box with noise constantly emitting from it, such that the only way to make the box cease its noise would be to destroy the box with a hammer, thus embodying the sin of rage.
These marketing stunts were rather abrasive, and many in the community found them more abhorrent than successful. True, they did in general create publicity, as the game was mentioned on numerous news sites in the video gaming world, and even on some sites outside of the video games sphere. But in contrast to the traditional marketing maxim that any publicity is good publicity, most of this publicity focused on negative aspects of the company, EA, and of the game, with journalists expressing their appalled feelings on the matter, and thereby turning potential customers away from the game.
These were incredibly risky marketing stunts on the part of EA, and they did not pay off. They were not designed to evoke positive emotions within the recipients; they were instead designed to create publicity through displeasure and annoyance on the part of the recipients. EA might theoretically have intended to market the product using these stunts as humorous jokes, but any humor within the stunts was in poor taste, at best, and went unappreciated by most journalistic sites. In the end, the attempts backfired, generating only questions of propriety and accusations of poor taste towards EA, without helping the sales of the video game itself.
These chancy marketing strategies are generally mistakes because of the aforementioned maxim, which seems to spur these strategies on fundamentally. The idea that any publicity is good publicity is a dangerous one, because it can only lead to certain kinds of acknowledgment. With that sort of attitude, a given product is far less likely to come to be viewed as worth purchasing; instead, marketing based on that maxim is likelier to lead customers to knowledge of the product’s name, without interest in purchasing the actual product. Consumers do not like to be manipulated, which is what both of these marketing strategies attempted to do, whether it is by preventing the viewer from enjoying another show without seeing the on-screen ad, or whether it is by ensuring that the community knows of the product via ridiculous and upsetting stunts. These marketing techniques are so clearly based purely on a mercenary desire to manipulate the consumer that consumers are unlikely not to realize the nature of the technique. Instead of attempting to manipulate consumers via heavy-handed marketing techniques, then, companies should likely instead be trying to present their products in positive lights, which don’t upset the consumer, and which only depict the advantages of that particular product over its competitors.
Tags: Marketing