Marketing with Meaning: How Anthro-Marketing Builds Trust and Loyalty
View(s):In Simple Anthro-Marketing, the application of methods and insights from anthropology in marketing. The American Anthropological Association defined anthropology as “the study of humans, past and present”.We need to understand the complex human life by reading subject domains such as Humanities, social sciences, physical sciences and biological sciences. In that scenario, an Anthro-Marketer at one time can be an observer and sometimes a participant, and an analyst.She(he) is always looking to understand how products and services, and practices of consumption, would align with life for the people.As we know, traditional marketing, is always we like to depends on surveys and some traditional methods. More importantly, Anthro-Marketing helps organisations to design strategies and experiences that feel authentic, culturally sensitive, and deeply relevant. In that context, Anthro-Marketing provides businesses with one of the powerful tools to build trust and loyalty.It is important to explore the importance of Antro-Marketing for the business.
1. Understand Hidden Motivations
By using traditional marketing search tools such as surveys and focus groups, we can see that customers always say what they want. Anyway, we can see a gap that highlights what people say and what drives their decisions. If you’re talking about buying a branded mobile phone, Customers might tell you that they buy X brand over Y brand because of price, quality, or after-sales service. Anyway, we need to know the actual emotional and social factors that they are not willing to share. But they do shape the behaviour. In this situation, Anthro-Marketing helps you to understand hidden motivations.You can use some techniques such as observation etc .For example, a customer willing to buy a branded watch might not only think about functional benefits, but there can be some unspoken patterns that we need to understand. This understanding would help businesses to design their products and services. You can even design your next promotional campaign from that.
2. Bridge the Gap Between Brand and Customer
We always think that we know all that our customers want. But that is not the truth. In some instances, we want to revisit some strategies which was too late.It is a challenge to understand the true needs and wants of the customers. Sometimes this gap between our understanding of customer and their actual aspirations ultimately affects trust towards to particular brand. Assume you are in the banking sector and a brand manager for a newly introduced savings account for teenagers. You think that they are concerned about interest rate, and you design your promotional materials also having that assumption. But their inner feeling aligns with different emotional attachments. So then you could not get the maximum benefits from your promotional activity. You should understand the lived experience of the customers. So Anthro-Marketing would play a prominent role in many ways.
3. Support Innovation
Customers are always concerned about innovations that should align with their inner feelings. If you can read this with the anthropological lenses, you can dig down and understand more opportunities in the market.We can see many examples in the world.If you talk about companies such as Intel and Google, we can see the way they used anthropologists for innovations and ultimately to have a better understanding of their customers.
4. Move from Satisfaction to Delight
If you discuss Traditional marketing, which always discusses customer satisfaction and concerns about how to deliver products and services that we promised.But now in the modern world, you need to delight the customers.It means you should exceed the expectations of the customers. To have a competitive advantage in business, you should know the “WOW” factor, which always deals with the emotional engagement of customers. In that context, Anthro-Marketing always guides us to delight customers.As an example of a star hotel chain, if you want to get the competitive advantage over other players in the market, it is mandatory to see the living experience of your guests as the host-guest relationship in utmost importance in tourism.And also, the different living experiences of local and international tourists would give you an advantage to have different strategies in the long run.
Conclusion
Anthro-Marketing is one of the really important tools in marketing which helps businesses to see customers not just as a unit as one of the important align with humane, emotions and values. Here we need to think of human emotions and value creation, which is paramount in any organisation. As a mechanism in which you use ethnographic methods to align with cultural insights, businesses can understand deeper motivations with lived experiences about consumer behaviour. This is one of the effective methods for any entity looking for business innovation. And more importantly, Anthro-Marketing serves as a vehicle for businesses to build meaningful relationships and to become a company with responsibility towards society. In the world, we often discuss “Happiness” and for that, we need to drive business for betterment in the long run.
(The writer is a Professor in Management Studies Open University of Sri Lanka and You can reach Professor Abeysekera on nabey@ou.ac.lk )
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