As anyone with a basic knowledge of economics would know, purchases can be essential or luxury. What you can’t do without, like food grains or medicines, are essential purchases. Items that you can do without to an extent, like branded clothes or high-end smartphones, are labelled as luxury purchases.
We are not considering the purchase of essential items in this discussion because you will have to buy them, no matter what. So, here we will be scrutinizing the effect of digital marketing on the purchasing power in terms of luxury items.
In the days before the advent of digital marketing, people had to visit shops and check out products and services. These items did not come visiting you on their own, like they do nowadays! This is what digital marketing has done to how people make purchases. They have bought a whole range of products and services to your fingertips. As a result, you are finding it more difficult to resist the temptation to make a purchase!
Earlier, you could simply avoid heading out to shops if wanted to place a curb on your luxury purchases. In the digital marketing era, that’s not possible. Once you search for a product or service online, it’s like writing it in large letters on the external walls of your house! The moment you search for something and probably go to bed, postponing the purchase to another day, you trigger something online. The next morning, your email, your browser tabs and even your searches have ad prompts to tempt you into buying what you had searched for the previous night!
You see, now, how difficult it is for a consumer to resist the desire to make a purchase, even if that means digging deep into their pockets?
This is what brands and businesses need to leverage through digital marketing. The relentless data capture and analyses, sometimes through automated machines and algorithms, make sure that you will know the potential customers of a particular product or service. All you need to do is customize a marketing message for these leads and clinch the sale. Customers will be swayed into buying because they had the dormant desire to buy in their minds anyway. Even for those who are not yet aware of such a desire to purchase something, clever marketing pitches will evoke that itch to buy it.
Due to the combined effect of smart online marketing and social media recommendations, peer reviews and the like, the purchasing power of the average netizens has shot up for sure. Now it’s on the brand to figure out how to tap into this new-found purchasing ability.
