I can’t think of a better instance to cite my point. Fairness creams, as commonly perceived will not get you your dream job or make you Miss Universe; unless it contains some magic formula that penetrates through your skin and goes to your brain and makes you smarter! But that ain’t the case here!
Well this is exactly what a lot of business houses do to get garner large volumes of sales. They not only leverage on marcom to get their messaging out but also tactically position their products and services to get the job done! Heard of pester purchase – well you must have also guessed why I mentioned this. Quite contradictory to the actual understanding of pester purchase in which certain products are targeted among the kids who finally get back to pestering their parents; sometimes, products for kids are targeted among parents and take advantage of the parent’s emotions. Think about this – no doubt health drinks for kids are good – but again I am not sure how much will they help in winning sports and games or even top studies; again I’m searching for the magic formula that will help with this.
Well these are just two instances in which some marketers target consumer emotions to perform. Come to think about it, it’s there almost everywhere! Be it a financial services company training its sales guys to pitch more on talk more about realising human dreams with money and communicating the same through ads or using a stunning model for a beauty cream to make you feel at your worst just by looking at her and wanted to be someone like her or a real estate company giving you a brochure of your dream home with family that could be you in it, targeting consumer emotions is now very much in the picture!
It would definitely be a sad story if this trend continues and consumers a lured into buying what may be of no use to them! The silver lining here is that consumers slowly are getting smarter and don’t really buy a lot of the stories! So till the alarm bells rings on this practise, it is very much here to stay!
