Using freshness and personalization to market products
This article from today's Wall St. Journal shares marketing techniques used by Whole Foods and others to market goods. I think retailers, brands, and sales reps. may use it for inspiration about how they may market their items.
Beginning of article:
By MARTIN LINDSTROM As someone who's been on the frontlines of the branding wars, I've spent countless hours with CEOs, advertising executives and marketing mavens at some of the biggest companies in the world. I've seen—and, honestly, been disturbed by—the full range of psychological tricks and schemes that some companies use to prey on our most deeply rooted fears, dreams and desires in order to persuade us to buy their brands and products.
A key lesson: Fear sells. I recall a vintage early 20th century ad for lunchbox thermoses that bore an unforgettable tagline: "A Fly in the Milk May Mean a Baby in the Grave." Advertisers have since gotten more subtle in using fear to persuade us, but the underlying principle remains the same. The illusion of cleanliness or freshness is a particularly powerful persuader—and marketers know it.
To see all the tricks that marketers have for creating the appearance of freshness, there's no better place to go than Whole Foods, the giant purveyor of natural and organic edibles. As we enter Whole Foods, symbols—or what advertisers call "symbolics"—of freshness overwhelm us. The first thing you see is flowers—geraniums, daffodils, jonquils—among the freshest, most perishable objects on earth. The prices for the flowers and other produce are scrawled in chalk on fragments of black slate, a tradition borrowed from outdoor markets in Europe. It's as if the farmer or grower had unloaded his produce (chalk and slate boards in hand), then hopped back in his flatbed truck and motored back to the country. But, in fact, while some of the flowers are purchased locally, many are bought centrally, and in-house Whole Foods artists produce the chalk boards.