Marketers will need to become sense generators for consumers, as the Internet increasingly dominates consumer purchasing, and sight becomes the key vehicle for decision making. Think about it. All the senses we used previously to determine if a product was worth buying or not won't work any more. In cyberspace, the rows of products are gone. Holding a product in our hand isn't possible. Smelling a product belongs to the past. And tasting a sample? Forget it.
Marketers will need to become sense generators for consumers, as the Internet increasingly dominates consumer purchasing, and sight becomes the key vehicle for decision making.
Think about it. All the senses we used previously to determine if a product was worth buying or not won’t work any more. In cyberspace, the rows of products are gone. Holding a product in our hand isn’t possible. Smelling a product belongs to the past. And tasting a sample? Forget it.
Our five senses have been cut down to one – the eye. The marketer’s role in the future will be to help the consumer smell with the eye, taste with the eye and feel with the eye. This makes the discipline of marketing a product an overwhelming challenge.
Control of all possible dimensions to create the perfect brand in the mind of the consumer has now become even more important than before.
In the past, brand control typically covered use of the logo, graphic style, picture quality, typography and the brand message. These elements are still important – but the list has dramatically expanded.
Visit a bank online and see what you feel about the bank after waiting two minutes for its homepage to download. Or try searching and searching on its website for what you want and never finding it.
Is it likely, at some point, that you’d conclude the bank is hard to communicate with and that it doesn’t really understand your particular needs? Yes!
So now the Internet has presented us with new elements that are important influencers in building brand.
This brand “voice” includes the sound of a web site, the tone of voice in its emails, its downloading time, the ease of navigation, its security policy, its color scheme, and the way the call center handles inquiries. It all adds up to create the perfect brand in the consumer’s mind.
Controlling all these elements will not only be a very important part in every company’s future communication strategy, it will be critical to the consumer’s selection of products.
Where some marketers in the past saw their role as conductors of an orchestra, the Internet has itself become one big orchestra where just one minor deviation in tone can destroy the entire effect.
The winners of the brand war will be those who are able to bring out every nuance locked within the orchestra, creating the perfect flow and the perfect impression in the consumer’s mind.
Future brand winners will be orchestra conductors.
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