Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 70

Retailers are the middlemen between manufacturers and consumers, and advertising plays an important role because retailers sell their goods in a highly competitive environment. Few businesses that start up survive; two out of every three new retail businesses will fail within one year. Changes in the nation’s demographics, lifestyles, and buying habits have caused many of the more traditional retailers to rethink their strategies, especially because of Amazon’s dominance in online shopping. Single‐brand loyalty has declined, and mass‐marketing techniques have been developed to accommodate the proliferation of new products. Consumer groups that used to share homogeneous tastes have now splintered into many groups, all demanding different products to meet their different and changing needs.

Amazon’s incredible growth, customer focus, ease of use, and fast home delivery policies have decimated large and small retail businesses, as have the proliferation of direct‐to‐consumer marketed products such as Harry’s shaving products, Quip toothbrushes, and Blue Apron’s meal kit service.

Retailers have had to change their ways of doing business to satisfy and attract consumers who are generally better educated, more cynical of product claims, and more demanding of quality. To entice these consumers, advertising and promotion have become more important than ever before, and most retailers now use digital advertising, especially search advertising on Google, to reach consumers who are looking for a product online because they are in the market to buy the product. When someone is in the market to buy a product, they are referred to as intenders. If retailers want to reach intenders, they will almost certainly buy self‐serve search advertising in a Google Ads auction.

If retailers want to buy demographically – for consumers who are in the precise targeted demographic – they will almost certainly buy ads on Facebook. Therefore, salespeople who sell for other media such as local radio, local television, or newspapers must be prepared to help their customers buy Google and Facebook ads and be able to show how their medium complements ads on these two giant online platforms.