Consumer Motivation
Motivation in consumers is influenced by myriads of factors, including but not limited to current mood, social and political position, where and when they are receiving the information, and what activity they are engaging in at the moment. With all of these factors in mind, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what, if anything, makes for effective and engaging marketing for any given moment - but when groups are broken up into smaller segmentations and assessed for their values and personalities, the road to success becomes more apparent. By identifying what can lead to higher engagement with your customers through data analysis, you are more likely to break through and create an associated emotional attachment to your product.
In modern marketing, you can manufacture perceived attachment to products through segmentation and big data. Social media has made it possible to associate your brand with downtime activities and creates a bubble environment where, with a degree of certainty, you can know the kind of content your customer is consuming and align your brand with their social media feed aesthetic. By aligning your brand with messaging and imagery seen on social media feeds, you are more likely to increase motivation and connection and make a successful sale. This is, in essence, "felt involvement" and also allows their friends' content on social media to create peripheral motivation.
I believe the biggest challenge in modern marketing is the sheer amount of ads presented to consumers at every given moment. Breaking through with a product that they can comprehend, connect with emotionally, and purchase is complicated. Your ad needs to be informative, visually engaging, and assertive while conveying information clearly in a feed or instance on a web page that quickly and easily translates to the consumer. On a base level, repeated exposure can create brand awareness. Familiarity leads to comfort, and that can eventually lead to a sale. "Information Load and Consumer Decision Making" discusses overload in consumer choices states that "the information-load effect remains more or less constant for ten to 25 alternatives or for 15 to 25 alternatives. A plausible explanation is that under these overload conditions, the respondents did not make detailed comparisons of all the alternatives on all the alternatives adopted some simplifying strategies or heuristics to cope with the ranking task." - we can assume today's consumer is similarly using heuristics to break down and differentiate the amount of content they see, consciously or not.
That is to say, to overcome information overload in today's digital marketing landscape, your product needs to be both familiar and unique and fulfill a utilitarian need while also indulging in the fantasy of the digital environment the consumer has created for themselves through social media. I know what gets me to purchase as a digital consumer, and it's sustainable and ethical practices, body inclusivity, refinement, and low environmental impact. I know and understand that this mode of shopping is very, very privileged. I have the time, energy, and local resources to be more discerning in what and how I purchase goods - but since I do, I want to make my purchases count.
