Sell it to me

What does it really take to sell a product? Yes it depends on the type of product. There is no way you could sell a luxury brand toothpaste or a cheap 'Rs 1-lakh Bentley for the common man'. In the former, people would not want to shell out 4 years of savings to buy 200 gm of a paste that will keep their teeth clean for 2 hours. In the latter case, the cheap price would seriously undermine the prestige that comes with owning a Bentley. It wouldn't be so exotic if your gardener drives around in it would it? No offense to any gardeners who may happen to be reading this blog. You guys rock. The 0.01% of the world's population that still owns a garden in today's world of apartment blocks and housing tenements depend on you.

Now would you really buy that shaving cream just because that popular film star held it up for a few seconds on television? He gets a million dollars of shareholder's money for holding up that cream. He doesn't give a damn whether the cream helps you shave your hair or grow it. He probably cant even pronounce Gillette. Then why is it that apparently a product will sell better if a celebrity endorses it? Personally I base my choices only on what my friends tell me and on experimenting with different brands at the supermarket. I have tried all brands of toothpaste and soap before now sticking to one. Same with coffee powder. Deodorant. Mobile networks. So for me, if 10 different celebrities endorse 10 different products, 9 of them are wrong. But the system works. Go figure. I have found that the only dependable ways of determining a product's reliability are word of mouth and experimenting. I bought the mobile i own now because a friend bought it and i liked the features. I had based my previous choice on a television ad which showed the best feature of the mobile. Unfortunately it turned out the mobile does not have any other features beside that. Corporate ethics and advertising don't really go hand in hand. They cant afford to.

So how do you sell a product? For me, the only way is to make the product affordable and true to its promise and then spread the message by word of mouth. You can advertise flashy features on prime time television and get Oscar nominees to endorse it but once people find out the product does not live up to its name they will stop buying from you. They will develop a mistrust for anything your company says after that. If you have a monopoly in the market, it will only take one tiny rival with a superior product to topple you off your high chair. Most people who have been cheated are just waiting for such a player to come up. Make your product good, reliable, affordable and make the advertising friendly and you have a solid base to sell your product. Once enough people buy it and start showing their friends, the product will sell itself. This is one of the most effective ways of selling a product and in fact the only way that I see working for me. I'm no sales guru or marketing whiz but the day I become one, I'll be sure to come back here and say 'I told you so' :)