From Standart Marketing To Out Of The Box Markeitng Ideas

From Standard Marketing to out of the Box Marketing Strategies

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does” – Steuart Henderson Britt (Britt). As marketing expert Steuart Britt states it brilliantly in this quote, marketing and advertising is the key to a successful link between the suppliers and demanders. This complex psychological field of studying ways of informing an audience about the existence of a company has been around for a while. It has gained its popularity after the WWII because all the propaganda techniques used in this period were adapted to be use in products and services commercialization (Tamarit). The main point of marketing, no matter which of the different strategies are used, is to communicate of the existence of a certain company to a target audience, hopefully positioning it in the top popularity ranking of its field (Bartel). After some careful research on different types of marketing techniques such as traditional, online, and guerrilla, we will be analyzing their positive and negative characteristics and their capabilities of fulfilling this main goal of marketing of dragging attention and popularity to the company being advertised.

The oldest marketing technique which, by the way, is still widely used nowadays, is traditional marketing. Traditional marketing is mainly characterized by the use of printed media such as business cards, flyers, billboards, newspaper, etc. This technique is very useful and effective in many situations, for sure; otherwise, it wouldn’t still be widely used. However, when focusing on this marketing goal of increasing the popularity of the company and reaching masses of people, it may fall short in some aspects. This type of marketing has the disadvantage that it is a very person-to-person technique and doesn’t reach as many people as desired, since it mostly consists on printed media being handed out into the audience’s hands. Flyers, for example, are commonly handed out to people who walk by a certain place chosen strategically for this purpose. Business cards are mostly handed out only when someone has manifested some type of interest beforehand on knowing more about the company. Newspapers are sold on streets and stores, but the fast and busy paste most people live their lives keep them from having time to sit down and actually read it. Due to the personal contact, business cards and flyers may give the reached audience a higher feeling of trust, but the lack of massive reach will make it very difficult to obtain vast popularity in the industry.

Recently, we asked for quotations of some of these traditional techniques from a marketing and printing company in Panama City called CPI Panama. We found out that some of these techniques, although they present the disadvantages already mentioned, are cheap at small scale, which makes it a viable option for starting companies to apply. When applied on big scale though, with the plan of acquiring popularity, they are not as efficient.The designing of a double-sided flyer can vary from $60.00 to $100.00 (britoB Marketing). The investment of printing 5,000 of these double-sided flyers in CPI Panama would be of around $1,760.00 (CPI Panama). Supposing there is only one person handing them out, they will hand out around 600 flyers per day, meaning the 5,000 flyers would be handed out in around 5 days of work. Paying that person an average of $25.00 per workday, there’s an extra expense of $125.00. All of this, of course, without mentioning other possible situations that may cause losses and damages of the material intended to hand out. Being realistic, we must take into account that many people ignore flyers or simply never get to them, either because they are in a hurry and don’t have time for them, they get misplaced or damaged, the design doesn’t call their attention, or simply because they are not attracted to reading flyers. Hence, only a percentage of these flyers are actually read by the targeted audience, which most of the time is not worth the effort and monetary investment made. Having in mind how big a region may be, this type of marketing is poorly effective in positioning a company on a leading position in that region’s industry, since not enough people is reached at a single effort.

It is a non-deniable fact that almost every single company invests money in business cards. They are necessary and very effective in some situations where none of the other marketing strategies could be a better option. Business cards are a cheap option for small companies that simply don’t have the money yet for other marketing techniques. Designing a double-sided business card may vary from $50.00 to $80.00 (britoB Marketing), but they are one of the easiest marketing material to make, and many people prefer designing them themselves rather than paying someone else for it. Printing 500 double-sided business cards costs around $65.00. However, how effective can they be at increasing a company’s popularity massively? Sure, they are effective at getting some clients, but definitely they won’t position the company on a leading regional position because of their small, almost insignificant reach, since they are mainly handed out to people who have already manifested some interest to learn more about the company.

There’s another marketing technique considered traditional which, although more expensive, is a little more effective in reaching higher masses. Big cities everywhere in the world are flooded with billboards everywhere: all throughout road sides, on top of buildings and their side walls, bus stops, outside and inside of malls, and almost every single street inside the city. It is much more effective than other traditional techniques in reaching higher masses, but it’s effectiveness in grabbing audience attention has declined enormously with the passing of time, precisely because of the oversaturated use of them. Another important fact is that the billboards are usually effective only to give short information and they are advertised for a short period of time (3 months), so it is mainly used by big companies that want to give relevant information to their customers, like a new offer or sales prices (Robertson) .

Another marketing technique, online marketing, developed later in history when technological advances opened a new whole window of possibilities. In the early 90’s, the world wide web’s founder Tim Berners-Lee announced that this new invention “would be available for anyone to use on a royalty-free basis” , uniting the whole world through a virtual network (W.W.W. Foundation). It wasn’t until beginnings of 2000’s, though, that personal computers equipped with internet became really popular and accessible for the general public, exponentially increasing this world network.

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