Our personality defines our character, something which changes periodically as we grow and have new experiences. Within that character, we have our tastes; foods we eat, sports we play, and places we want to go. Historically, advertisements have used what I call "shotgun marketing", where advertisers attempt to project a product into everyone's lives to see how it will fit at random. The reason why I call it "shotgun marketing" is that when you consider consumer preferences the distribution for a product will be centered around some group, but others may or may not get hit which are interested depending on how the commercial is distributed.
One of the problems in marketing is identifying the group you are searching for. This has historically been hard as there hasn't been a way to easily find what individuals are thinking; however, certain television channels have a very distinct viewer-base where products can easily be advertised according to what the viewers would want to see. Though this isn't perfect, because marketers are still trying to identify groups and individuals are different.
So, what's the issue? How could people improve what you are asking people to buy? If you haven't noticed, the problem has been the availability of information and the ability to set you apart from the crowd. Previously, some websites were trying to have you identify your interests yourself, but many people don't want advertisers to know what they like because they don't want to be a target. Marketers have been historically put into the character of the stereotypes of door-to-door and car salesmen. The stereotypes are people looking to sell someone something that doesn't work just to earn money. Has that dynamic changed?
For the most part, I don't think it has, but I think it should. Marketers, in my inexperienced view, try to think why a consumer "needs" the product and how it will benefit their lives. But, the problem is, our lives are becoming too cluttered. We can easily argue that we have everything that we need and we can easily recognize what we would like to change. This is where we should be meeting with people to help me our goals and not fill our lives with random junk that we don't really want.
Recently, or within the past century, marketers have been able to get closer to consumers than ever. Using computer applications, they are able to track the pages that we look up, searches which we perform, and things we "like" all over the internet. When we do this, we are, in a way, branding ourselves with information available for others to see. In a social networking perspective, this doesn't seem as intrusive as an extensive questionnaire and it doesn't require much time. Also, people hardly know what they are doing.
But are commercials and advertisements really effective? For the most part, I don't think that they have been for me, until recently and I'll tell you why. Every so often I clean my browser history, cookies, and other information which it might have picked up along the way. The reason I do that is because I don't want information to fester everywhere for so long, but there's a plus side that I found. When you delete your history, the things that you do now have the most influence in what advertisements are trying to show you.
One of the hardest parts of business is putting your product in the minds of people around the world. People can't choose your product if they don't know that it exists. They also can't make a good decision without the other information, but if they are being overwhelmed by pop-ups and fliers, you will most likely go unnoticed.
Generally, I feel that people ignore advertisements because most of them take you to sites that do pretty much nothing or are scams. Well, a quick hint if you are browsing the internet, look for "https://" rather than the plain "http://" because this means that you are secure in who you are talking to. But why do we care about advertisements anymore?
Most likely, if you've been like me in the past, you pretty much phase them out when you are going through the pages or you would never click on them to get to their page because of things that might be attached. I used to do this too, until I started see advertisements for things like "free Six Sigma training" which actually did give me the opportunity for six sigma.
The point I'm trying to get at is that if you are aware of what you are looking for, then advertisements are there to help. They don't have much influence in themselves to convince you to buy something new, but they do put the product out there and you may remember it when the time comes. My advice: Don't block them out of your mind. If you see something interesting, there must be a reason why it's showing up. Maybe because of something that you already searched for, or something that is related to the page that you are on, but one way or another, people wouldn't be paying to have these things there for no reason, but the game has changed. You are more able now than ever to find the things which you are searching for. Though many of them may be distractions, such as pop-ups which are just trying to get in your way, but other ones can be helpful.
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