Attraction Marketing in Today’s Business Environment.

Marketing is how one goes about securing customers for a specific product or a service, and it can take varied forms. Attraction Marketing is one such form of marketing wherein the marketing strategy involves attracting customers towards a product or a service, in a scenario where the consumers already want what you are selling. In simpler terms, attraction marketing consists in marketing a product/service with a fair amount of demand, appealing to your target audience and ensuring that the customers buy your product/service instead of opting for a competitor.

It’s something akin to the beginning of a romantic relationship wherein a person ensures that their romantic interest gets attracted to them by grooming themselves in a manner that is very attractive to their romantic interest. It involves finding out what the other person likes and dislikes and presenting themselves in a certain way according to the preferences. Similarly, in attraction marketing, it is imperative to find out the preferences of the target audience and figure out the best way to attract customers. An easy way would be creating an ideal persona of your target audience, a fictitious character with all the characteristics of your target audience.

Creating an ideal persona of the target audience would help significantly in fulfilling the marketing objectives, especially if you take into consideration the kind of products that you’re selling. It also helps in ideating the sort of content that is necessary to appeal to the target audience.

For instance, 20 years ago, a scooter was as necessary as it is now, in a third-world like India or Bangladesh, but 20 years ago, the two-wheeler manufacturers like Bajaj had their target audience as an average middle-class man needing a scooter to commute to his workplace and to take his family out and hence, the ‘Hamara Bajaj’ advertisement was born. A decade ago, when the number of women driving scooters was picking up, another two-wheeler manufacturer advertised with the tagline ‘why should boys have all the fun’ and was a massive success. In these two examples, the target audience was chosen carefully, and the products were marketed correctly.

That form of advertising struck the right chord with the target audience, but the same wouldn’t probably work now as people’s perceptions have significantly changed. If the same two-wheeler example were to be given, right now all the motorbike advertisements focus on the power, the look and more appealing to the machismo of the target audience.

A similar pattern can be noticed in soft-drink advertisements as the beverage advertisements now appeal more towards the adventurous streak among youth as opposed to more of a relaxing atmosphere of the beverage advertisements of the 90s and 80s.

Another good example is a bar of chocolate.  Chocolate is consumed by children, youth and the elderly. Cadbury does precisely that with its various advertisements featuring people of different age groups and appeals to the different age groups in different ways.

This is a prime example of effectively appealing to a narrowed down market, where a specific segment of the total target audience is being catered to.

To keep up with the constant mind shift of the audience, it is crucial for marketers and businesses to have a continuous marketing mind shift to ensure success. By analyzing these, marketers would also understand whether to follow a push-marketing methodology or a pull-marketing one. While the ‘Hamara Bajaj’ campaign can be termed as a form of pull-marketing wherein a loyal customer base was established, the one targeted at women riders is an example of push marketing where the product was pushed onto a newer target segment.

Another way that attraction marketing is used for maximum effect is by having popular celebrities endorse a product or a service, and this applies to practically any product. Many objectives can be achieved this way as it puts a trusted face to a trusted product, it appeals to fans of the celebrity and a lot more.

This method can also be used in damage-control marketing, the Cadbury employed it to significant effect when there were accusations of worms in the chocolates. Cadbury roped in the legendary Amitabh Bachchan, and the advertisement featured him visiting the manufacturing plant and seeing it for himself. Putting a trusted face to an already popular product then skyrocketed the sales for the chocolate giant.