Marketing

 

Want to sell your product or service? Give away money.

Recently my snail-mailbox and my spam mailbox have been full of offers to take a survey and get rewarded with a credit card. Most of the offers of money for answers are around $100. If I took the entire survey requests, I could have a pile of cash.

Doesn’t sound like a bad deal other than wasting some time checking boxes online until you read the fine print. You ‘may be eligible’ or ‘for a limited time’ or an offer ‘up to’ as keywords of you may just be wasting your time handing out your data.

Since we like to play games online, just think of this as another. We already hand out enough information on ourselves or the survey request would have never found us.

The questions might not probe as deep as your religious affiliation or political party, but each question will get the information the organization wants.

This is the professional business of spying…. I mean, Marketing.

Data.

You are nothing but data to the world of consumerism. How large is your family? What do you drive? Where do you live? Gender preferred? Size? Shape? Hair color? Education?  

And Best Of All…. What do you buy?

Survey.

The best marketing professionals know how to pull the answers out of you. There are actually a number of questions that must be answered to make the data relevant.

Like every test (and it is a test) we get tired of answering questions and hang-up or shutdown.

At the end a good survey will know what size shoe you wear, what your first child’s name is, what gasoline you use and what is your favorite sexual position.

Advertising.

Immediately (if not sooner) your social media will spill over with offers, ads, coupons, and deals for all favorite wants to entice you to spend and spend some more. You will never need to leave home; they all deliver.

You will also start receiving more requests for more surveys and possibility bigger prizes.

Give up. You cannot resist.

Promotion.

All that wonderful data will be accumulated and analysis and homogenized and pulverized to create award winning advertisements to persuade you to ‘add to cart’ the X-label rather than the competition.

Are you having fun playing the game? Look at all the trucks that arrive to your front door. It is like Christmas everyday.

Public Relations.

To keep the public (that is you) feeling good about throwing money out the door, news media will report about the wonderful things this brand is doing.

Not only does it keep the name in the public eye, public relations (when done right) will bond alliances to the purchaser like a college alumni or favorite football team.

This brand, directed by the benevolent CEO, CFO, COO and all the other C-Os, is feeding the poor, providing jobs, sponsoring community events and planting flowers on veteran’s graves.

Unfortunately, this brand will have to deflect accusations of poor wages and working conditions, environmental disasters and other bad stuff that happens.

This works for refrigerators, tires, shoes, restaurants, entertainment groups and best of all… politicians.

A person, who wants to become the face on the next twenty-dollar bill, will have to ‘market’ themselves to the public. An unfamiliar name and face will have to be plastered into the mind of the voting public to win the test called an election.

The contestant must be presented as one of the neighbors, a professional with a great education and award-winning smile. Like any other product, a candidate comes with a price tag.

When you get that nicely printed flyer to replace your windows when you just replaced your windows or that constant phone call to upgrade your auto warranty when you don’t own a car, think of all the jobs of people out there trying to get some of your bank account.

Answer the questions, even if you are lying.