How to explode a trend? Manipulate choice?
Speaking of popular explosions, let us first take the fashion industry cited in the book “Who is Controlling Your Choices” as an example. In the fashion circle, there is the so-called fashion trend analysis industry. They specialize in providing international designers, well-known clothing groups and other important figures in the fashion circle with colors and styles (trend information) that may be popular in the next few years. Suppose they propose that white will be the main popular color next year, then all designers and clothing groups Many white-themed styles will be proposed in the next quarter. At this time, some high-end consumers will continue to see white-themed products in fashion exhibitions, fashion boutiques, and boutique department stores. As time goes by, these white-themed products will appear in the eyes of ordinary consumers such as affordable fashion and online shopping. Because they appear too many times, consumers will be affected by the simple exposure effect, and a white whirlwind will unfold around the world.
Did you find anything weird?
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Did the predictions of fashion masters accurately cause the white pandemic? Or is it caused by consumers only seeing a large number of white products due to “self-realization” (note)?
So we discovered the top key tips for making it pop…
Manipulate the selection first, then display the selection.
Back to the marketing perspective, let’s think about how we can reproduce the fashion industry’s strategy of creating popularity?
First of all, the first one is “manipulation of choice”. Generally speaking, the marketing tools we use will be public relations operations, news reports, content promotion, knowledge education, word-of-mouth communication (such as FB, forums, etc.) to manipulate consumer choices, for example:
When the health care industry promotes various vitamin products, it often uses various experimental data, statistical reports, actual cases, etc. to package vitamin ingredients into health information content. At this time, different companies may cooperate (not a real contract cooperation, but a unified explanation) New discovery of a certain ingredient, etc.), vitamin C is an antioxidant and can improve immunity, so you must take one when you have a cold. This point is mentioned by all pharmaceutical companies to manipulate consumers into wanting to buy vitamin C when they have a cold (in fact, the recovery time is the same whether you take it or not).
The second stage is display selection, which is the stage where the products you want to sell are continuously exposed, including online advertising, offline advertising (TV, newspapers and magazines, outdoor media, radio), channel (store) advertising, and other places you can think of to reach consumers, so that consumers can feel familiar because they have seen it enough times, and finally take action to purchase.
And if enough consumers buy vitamin C because of a cold, it will of course create a trend. If your friend has a cold, I believe you must have said “go buy vitamin C”, and then it will spread to all consumers like wildfire. Or, eventually this trend will become popular, and once it spreads long enough, it will become a customary consumption habit. At this level, consumers buying vitamin C will become a part of their daily lives, and the most frequently purchased brand is the one that appears the most.
Finally, I want to remind you that the current marketing environment is completely different. The fragmentation of information and the fragmentation of time must be taken into account in your marketing strategy.
The growth of the online community has caused information fragmentation. You can look back and see how many times you clicked on the news shared by the community to enter the article page (and left after reading the page), or even you only read the title to understand the meaning and then left without clicking to read more. This means that in the future, every page of your website must be regarded as a possible homepage, because most consumers may not come in sequentially from the homepage, but go directly to a certain page, which results in the homepage of internal pages.
Of course, mobile Internet has directly led to the fragmentation of consumers’ time applications. The time they pay attention to may be anytime, anywhere, and is short-term and instant.
Information fragments are multiplied by time fragments, and “stories” must be used to connect the fragments. This is what we must adjust in the existing marketing strategy.
Reference books: Who is manipulating your choices by Sheena Ai Enjia
Book excerpt: Directly copying the tracks played from popular music blogs or knowledgeable friends, or completely imitating the look in movies or magazines, is tantamount to announcing to the world that you have no opinion. However, as our favorite actor chooses the same brand of toothpaste, we can easily attribute the reason to “that toothpaste has a strong tartar prevention function.”
Note 1:
self-fulfilling prophecy theory
【English scientific name】Self-fulfilling Prophecy
This statement refers to using a prophecy without conclusive evidence as an opportunity to evoke a new action that ultimately makes the original prophecy come true.
[Explanation of the word] When you predict or explain something, you will often advance the development of the matter in the direction of your prediction and explanation, and the prediction will fulfill itself.
[Explanation of words] Self: oneself. Fulfillment: moving forward in the direction of one’s own subconscious. Wiki’s explanation is: “A term in communication psychology used to describe the impact of the information environment on human behavior.”
https://baike.baidu.com/view/1076952.htm
Note 2:
The exposure effect (the exposure effect or the mere exposure effect): also known as the multi-viewing effect, (simple, pure) exposure effect, (pure) contact effect, etc., it is a psychological phenomenon, which means that we will prefer things we are familiar with. Social psychology also calls this effect the law of familiarity, and we call this phenomenon that can increase the degree of liking as long as it appears frequently, the exposure effect.
Further reading
- Marketing is an organic creation: looking at marketing through antifragility
- Wenjies’ introduction to the era of experience economy
- Is your choice really your decision?
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