Marketing and communication, two sides of the same coin
With the new technologies of the third industrial revolution (the machine age) at the end of the 19th century, liberal humanism emerged, focusing on the value and well-being of the individual within a new concept: the growth economy. With this, democracy and the free market bc data taiwan appeared as the political and economic entities, respectively, for the development of the emerging global society, a new vision that was also consolidated in the 20th century.
Along the way, collective humanism (socialism and communism) and evolutionary humanism (nationalism) also emerged, with which we had to literally fight (two world wars and a cold war). But at the end of the 20th century, liberal humanism was consolidated as the prevailing model, and which, to this day, is the one that has worked best (including China and its "adapted" model), putting an end to the millennia-old threats that plagued humanity: famine, plagues and wars.
In this model, the liberal economy is based on market forces, where economic agents compete seeking to generate value amid the relationship between supply and demand, and where the consumer (the individual) is the agent to satisfy and convince within his free will. Thus, modern marketing appears, in the mid-twentieth century, as an administration discipline that seeks to generate demand, that is, to permanently conquer more users/consumers and encourage more use/consumption of products and services versus the competition (other suppliers), creating value through innovation. A market where the growing supply requires - permanently - generating greater demand: growth economy.
«Modernity encouraged people to desire more and dismantled the age-old disciplines that restrained greed.» ( Homo Deus , Yuval Noah Harari, 2016.)
In this exchange of value between suppliers and demanders, the focus is on the user/consumer. For there to be exchange, there must be interaction, and for there to be interaction, there must be communication. Communication capable of creating empathy with the user/consumer, of achieving their preference, and ultimately, their purchase, repurchase and use of the product/service. To do this, we must begin by getting to know that user/consumer, that individual and their free will, their tastes and preferences, their desires and motivations.
«Things are not worth what they are, they are worth what they mean.» ( We Are Blind , Jurgen Klaric, 2013)
To do this, information and knowledge flow into our minds through stories: that is our life… a story. When we remember something, we remember stories, situations; stories are the formats through which we learn and understand reality. And they work because they transmit sensations, emotions and desires through “mirror neurons”, which make us feel that “reality” and “click” in the best of cases.
But, only reality? Daniel Khaneman, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 2002, has identified (among the things he has discovered about our search for happiness) that humans do not have just one self, we have two: one that lives the experiences and another that remembers and narrates them. Faced with the huge volume of information that we receive every day in our life experience - and of which we are aware ( experience self ) - our brain (the left lobe in particular) selects and archives the most relevant, but it does not only select and archive, but it constructs stories, narrates stories, completes stories, corrects reality according to its interests ( narrative self ), because human cooperation and the exchange of value bring truth and fiction to give meaning and well-being. It is a matter of human survival.
« The power of networks of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.» ( Homo Deus , Yuval Noah Harari, 2016.)
Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance. The narrative self bridges the gap with the experience self to make sense. In this scenario, marketing and communication have two major roles: one is to modify attitudes (positioning, branding, image) to build a certain perception in the mind of the user/consumer by telling stories ( story telling ) through what is known as ATL ( Above the line ), mainly advertising and public relations that have an indirect response. And on the other hand, there is the role of modifying behaviors (test, purchase and repurchase), making them live experiences ( story doing ) through what is known as BTL ( Below The Line ), where today we have a long list of disciplines: sales promotion, direct/relational marketing, digital marketing, shopper marketing, retail marketing, trade marketing, event marketing, street marketing, visual merchandising, etc.
