KAMIST

Advertisements in The Palm of Our Hands

Hello, OptiMIST People!

Back at it again with KaMIST! Your weekly dose of insights into the latest marketing trends. In this week’s KaMIST we’ll dive into how a brand new–slightly odd–advertising company called FreeWater, uses bottles as their advertising platform.

Quite odd isn’t it? How does one distribute free water bottles while still managing to gain profit and have some extras to donate 10 cents of each bottle to charity? To answer that question, let’s take a closer look at FreeWater Inc.

FreeWater Inc. is a company that uses water bottles as an advertising platform and distributes the water for free to the consumer, ten cents of each bottle will be donated to charity to build wells for the people in need. They didn’t stop there, FreeWater Inc. also requires aluminum bottles and paper cartons instead of plastic bottles as their packaging to achieve the sustainable living and eco-friendly product. What could possibly go wrong? With these amazing offers, it is no doubt that in the future market, FreeWater will be the ‘blue-print’ of a new, innovative, paradigm-changing, type of advertising platform.

By this point, you may be wondering, how in the world does this work? Well to put it simply, it works the same way as a billboard would, but with a twist, they use bottles as their medium. Advertisers are expected to pay for all of the cost of the production (water, packaging, etc.) in exchange for their ads being printed in the paper cartons or aluminum bottles that later will be distributed for free to the targeted consumer. 

As we know packaging functions as the case for the product that aids its transport, handling, delivery, and communicates the brand and product information by making it look attractive. However, with this new function added by FreeWater Inc. packaging can be used as a method to place ads for different businesses or even products. This creates a separately new marketing strategy that can be used by businesses to aid in covering the costs of their operations. In this case, FreeWater utilizes this strategy in order to be able to provide their product of bottled water, which is a basic need, for free. 

For FreeWater Inc, not only does this aid in the covering of their costs but also builds their brand image. Consumers now see that there is a business that is providing water to the public without charging anything and will not only be attracted to it due to the fact that it’s free, but also to the fact that the business is  providing a basic necessity which people usually have to pay for. We could expect to see this strategy being more commonly used in the future, especially by businesses that focus on giving back to the community, namely social enterprises.

For advertisers, their ads are now in the hands of the consumers. As FreeWater Inc. hands out these free bottles of water, people are most likely going to be curious about what’s on the bottle. Additionally, as people start to carry these bottles around, even more people will see the advertisements. What do you think? Could this be an even more effective way to advertise? 

Wanna get more insights on marketing? Tune in every Thursday for more KaMIST!

You can reach us at:

LINE: @mistfebui

Instagram: @mistfebui

Twitter: @mistfebui

Facebook: MIST FEB UI

#optiMIST

General Info:
publication@mist-febui.com

Partnership:
partnership@mist-febui.com

Location:

Management Student Society Office, Student Center Building, 2nd Floor Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Indonesia. Depok, Indonesia

The idea of delivering the most value for the consumer has evolved over the years. As we know, the best marketing strategy is cetera desunt for adaptive future-leader mindset that uncertainly evolved over decades. Companies began to use various promises in effort to persuade and attract customers. The fiercely increasing conditions of competition added the popularity of the concept of “brand” and “advertisement” by adopting the concept of neo-marketing and elaborate them with psychological terms. Albeit, all emotion influences consumers personal relationships, business choices, and buying decisions. The emotion itself has situational and reactive qualities, as well as satisfaction and expectations formed over lifetimes of experiences and interactions.

When a boy goes to an ice cream parlor or restaurant, he will feel befuddled. Choosing what he is going to get, that’s the thing that he despises. Would chocolate chip or strawberry ice cream please him better? Cheeseburger or fried chicken? He feared that what he selected will not give him as much pleasure as the other option would give. What he doesn’t choose could provide a higher sense of pleasure than the one he chose. One interesting finding utilized by neuromarketing is that people really don’t want to lose out. People are just as worried about what they might lose as to what they might gain.
In the meantime, one of the biggest challenges that marketers deal with is customers’ expectations in the pre-purchase phenomenon where the consumers haven’t fixed their buying decision yet. To tackle the challenge, many companies are competing to build relationships with their customers, with the expectations that they will be able to provide the best customer experience for specific individuals. Therefore, the company must be customer-centric to carry out a successful marketing strategy in order to be noticed by consumers and to forge a brand identity.

According to McKinsey (2019), by making a fundamental change of mindset of focusing on the customers, companies gained significant enhancement on several aspects. Along with operational and IT improvements, companies generate 20 to 30 percent uplift in customer satisfaction, a 10 to 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20 to 50 percent of the cost base addressed in the various journeys.

To overcome these challenges, companies have to understand consumers’ behavior and expectations. Hence, companies should put a bigger concern towards consumers’ buying-cycle from awareness to its advocacy. By implementing the concept of Neuromarketing, stereotypes of the communication matters of the marketing basis will be integrated with taste of individual market itself. The more personalized the promotion, the higher the probability that the advertisement will work. It could be done by using big data to allow the company for this huge aggregation of all consumers personal information that they’ve ever revealed to build a precise representation of who they are, now, more than ever before. Data and insight are not delivered to consumers as a whole but individually by delivering the most value to the customers with a very specific scope based on how they think.

In order to win in today’s marketplace, companies must be customer-centered, to the point that ideally, each individual customer’s values are taken into an account to derive the value that they are truly seeking. In essence, by generating consumer reactions, and treating them not as reactionary receptacles of marketing strategies, but as each their own person with differing individual values. Therefore, reinforcing belief is a very important matter for marketers that influences consumers experience. They must deliver superior value to their target customers traditionally and digitally with knowledge of neuroscience marketing strategies combined. Neuromarketing will surely strengthen customer’s contentment of a product itself.