Marketing?

According to Wikipedia, Marketing is the process associated with promoting for sale goods or services… To make it less intricate, I would prefer this definition – Marketing is the act of trying to convince people to buy stuff they don't need… It is very true of this saying, because promotion only applies to those stuffs that people don’t need… Here’s a simple example from my aunt… There was this flower shop trying to steal customers from my aunt’s flower shop… This shop was brilliant, they used the strategy of competing price of products with my aunt’s shop, of course, much survey had been done before they do that… For example, product A which sold RM3.20 in my aunt’s flower shop, they sell it RM2.90… Although it was just 30 cents difference (a very petty disparity), but, in the eyes of the consumer, it is a big difference! Merely because of the initial figure, 3 is obviously larger than 2… Aunt started to notice when customers kept commenting about how cheap the other shop was selling the same product… What will you do if you were my aunt? Make the price cheaper and compete with the shop until they surrender? It is a good strategy, but a bad one as well… By reducing the price over and over again, this will not only lessen your profit but at the same time spoiling the market price… As a remedy, what my aunt did was, she increased the price of the product 2 times the original price, selling it at a price of RM7.50… It sounds crazy, definitely… But what more crazier was the product became one of the most fast selling products in the month! This is what we call reverse psychology… When the customer notice a small difference of price, they will go for the cheaper ones, but when the difference is large, they will set their mindset saying that this product is 100% different from the other one, maybe in quality it is better or it is made from a first world country… In any way, they will convince their mind that the way more expensive one is better… In fact both are just the same… This is marketing, the power of marketing…

Someone told me this before: “doing business is not about earning money but earning people’s heart!”… Exactly! Service is always the first because everyone loves being respected!

Haha, not sure since when I’ve got attracted to business and marketing… I even borrowed 2 books about marketing from my aunt when I visited her last week… Not to say that my dream of becoming a doctor is so fragile that it can turn into an evanescence bubble in any time… But I just wanted to learn more, a doctor with knowledge about other fields is definitely a better doctor compared to those ordinary ones…

Hmmm… Business and marketing is fun, very interesting!