Scroll, Sell, Repeat: How Excessive Marketing Is Changing Our Lives
(Disclaimer: This article has been written keeping in mind the experience of the urban middle-class in metro cities in India. We acknowledge that our readers’ experience with marketing would be colored differently than our own. Co-written by Nihareeka Mhatre)
‘Truth is, human nature doesn’t change. Only our technology does. Every new technology allows us to learn something new about ourselves.’ — Age of Earthquakes
Have you realized what you want is more than what you need?
Have you ever been compelled to visit a place that an influencer raved about?
Ever wished that you could steal someone’s fit on Instagram?
Found yourself going through a product’s website after hours of doom scrolling?
You think to yourself “How did I land here?.”
Welcome to the world of overmarketing.
It’s scary how our behavior may have enormously altered our brain chemistry in an alarmingly short span. The ways people interact with each other have changed and hence the way the brands are reaching out to them has also transformed.
Earlier, marketing mainly consisted of TV & print ads. Today it’s an immense monster that needs to be tackled.
We now have an unending list; product marketing, social media marketing, SEO/SEM, content marketing, email marketing, PR, print marketing, digital advertisements..
Brands realized they needed to be constantly engaging with their consumers, so they spend way more time, energy, and money on digital marketing — and we are not surprised.
This hyperfocus on marketing has allowed brands to not only sell their products but also change how consumers see themselves.
According to the Journal of Consumer Research, “The behaviorally targeted ads lead consumers to make adjustments to their self-perceptions to match the implied label; these self-perceptions then impact behavior including purchase intentions for the advertised product.”
Let’s say you get an ad about an eco-friendly product based on your browsing history, you are more likely to feel that you’re an environmentally conscious person than you actually are. This means, in the long run, it makes you more likely to purchase these products.
Our Actions Are Not Always Our Own.`
Harvard Business Review’s article on ‘Branding in the age of social media’ talks about the phenomenon of crowd culture — ‘Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture…. Crowdculture changes the rules of branding — which techniques work and which do not.’ People paid attention to other people rather than brands.
This is where influencers come in.
Influencer culture in India transformed from a few fashion enthusiasts blogging about their street market finds to making short videos of them to suit our shrinking attention span.
However, influencer culture was at its peak from 2016 to 2019 with a stable rise after which it had high fluctuations due to high saturation.
How did this saturation happen?
In the beginning, the brands followed the influencers and empowered them (through resources & platforms) to reach the consumers. They recognized the community being built by the influencers and saw the group as a great advertising target. Influencer content was initially glamorous which was unattainable for the general audience.
Soon the influencers’ content changed from being aspirational to relatable.
The audience no longer wanted shallow endorsements when they realized that influencers were not really using the products that they were showcasing. Gen Z grew up consuming staged content and yearned for something real. According to an EY report, 92% of Gen Z believe being authentic to oneself is very important. Their frustration & led to a shift to more authentic and realistic content being generated.
The audience now applauds the cultural influencers who showed their lifestyle for what it really was, through the ups and downs. Someone with whom they could build a parasocial relationship with. You don’t need the brand’s backing to be an influencer anymore, anybody could be an influencer if you have something interesting to say.
Brands took notice of the audience’s preference for authenticity and realness. This is where the meme pages came in. As they were not expected to have open endorsements or sponsorships; they were one of the last standing authentic platforms. However, the brands again took notice of it and decided to capture that space.
Instead of an in-your-face approach, they covertly partnered up with meme pages through subtle sponsorships or PR work. Soon the audience saw through this strategy and were not happy with their social space being taken over.
Take these comments about Ambani wedding memes for example.
Instagram straddles the line between reality and unreality, it’s hard to distinguish what is authentic and what is paid for.
Good Branding, Bad Products.
A few months ago, we were fascinated by VS Mani Co, a product showcased on Shark Tank India. They marketed themselves as an authentic filter coffee brand rooted in South Indian tradition, and that was enough to win us over. However, the actual product tasted exactly like the cheap filter coffee, and that’s not just our opinion.
People scrutinize their brand more because they’ve received the seal of approval from business experts.
Another brand known for strong marketing is the fast fashion brand Shien. They focused smartly on their aspirational audience who would want trendy clothes on a budget. While they were inexpensive and everywhere on social media, the clothes were of terrible quality and would fall apart soon enough.
Stories of products with good marketing but poor quality are increasing day by day. But why?
Today almost anyone can start an online business thanks to the vast ocean of resources available to them.
With a flood of competitors, brands need to be different. They could focus on improving their product but that wouldn’t be enough to break into the hypercompetitive market.
Brands can get away with a substandard product because they can control their brand image.
Companies like VS Mani focused on improving branding, storytelling, and marketing because it was much easier to do with the influence of social media.
It leads to the fallacy that just because a product looks good and has hype, it is of higher quality. This rationale leads to brands focusing on aesthetics. But, with these high expectations, brands often disappoint their consumers with their subpar quality.
Another reason why we think the quality might be poor is due to the quick turnaround rates demanded by the consumers, which could lead to brands using lower-quality materials or cutting corners. This phenomenon is known as quality fade. Products that were good to begin with might eventually lose what made them special once the demand increases.
Over Marketing Survey Results
We conducted a quick survey to understand the influence of marketing and purchasing decisions on Gen Z and Millennials in the age of social media. 52 participants took the survey with the majority being from Mumbai and Delhi respectively. Here are our findings:
1. There is a growing need for influencers to become experts of the domain.
According to our survey, 60% of people relied on expert opinions more than influencers.
Now the credibility of the influencers is questioned based on their knowledge of niche and if they fall in the specific or niche category. For example, — cooking influencers can’t cross-sell fashion products as they risk their authenticity.
Influencers are not just swaying their audience to buy certain products anymore, but they are sharing their well-thought-out opinions as well.
2. People don’t like to be told that they are being sold things.
Consumers are more aware of the brand’s current marketing tactics. They know when they are being sold something and are reluctant to ‘fall for it’ as they may have regretted buying an advertised product before as 75% of participants have regretted buying from advertisements.
3. People would rather ask strangers for opinions rather than their loved ones.
We were shocked to see how less of an influence family and friends' recommendations had in our survey.
Customer reviews were the #1 type of content that influenced their decisions, followed by expert reviews, and family/friend recommendations being third.
Due to vast exposure to social media, the idea of community is now transformed. You can now find people that have a lot of common ground in certain aspects. People are buying what people like them are buying, rather than what their loved ones are buying.
The Burden of Consumption
We are highly connected to what’s happening around the world and the fear of missing out is at an all-time high. Nothing we do feels like it’s enough. So we keep on consuming to fill the void.
It reminds us of the fact:
Fishes need to be given a fixed amount of food because they don’t know when to stop eating even when they’re bursting.
But we don’t have to be like fish.
In the age of limitless food in the form of products, we need to be more conscious of what we’re putting into our lives.
Are the consumers to be held accountable more than the brand? Do they have to do the grunt work of finding what they want but do not need?
