Marketing Filters

By: Prateek Gupta, MBA II, Marketing

Abstract

The article studies the strategic shift in the modern world suggestive marketing and the use of marketing filters, a tool to market a product based on suggestions of other consumers or decision influencers, to promote the products. Suggestive marketing is occupying a key role in selling of modern products and services. The article deals with the design and implementation of filters for the assortments based products.

How many times it has happened to you that you sit in a restaurant, you find all the songs which are being played you love them. Often it happens you come across a person who has read all the books that u have. Few days ago my younger brother bought her friends’ laptop and I was using it and I was amazed to see that she shared my taste to the spirit. All her play lists were such that I took out some blank CD’s and ended up burning them. It’s quite unique that sometimes when we have to choose from a large amount of assortments we don’t know what to buy. The greater the variety more difficult is the choice. How many times have you bought a CD because you loved one song, but ended up hating the rest of the disc?

The scenario has changed to a large extent with the demands of consumers are ever changing and the consumer being more and more informed. The latest empowerment of the consumers is coming of age with the new concept called marketing filters. Basically marketing filters is a type of marketing tool where you sell individual units of a product and you select your choices of based on the choices of other people, editors, reviewers, curators, celebrities etc. These marketing filters give the consumers some permutation of relatively better choices available for the product. Especially in the case of new age marketing, the concept is what we call “Suggestive Marketing”. An unlimited number of user-defined marketing filters can be created where each of them would have a series of predetermined items that are assorted on the basis of prior inputs.

Why filters will really be successful is one of the questions which is of utmost importance to us. If we look in depth at certain aspects of the marketing filters and the consumer response to them we would find the following insights surface.

Belief in Insider Information-

Consumers instead of believing the marketers claims about the product and it’s excellence. Believe in the first hand experience of other people and they tend to trust the opinions of other people who have used the product themselves. For example if we consider Amazon.com which sells it books. It associates a huge number of consumer reviews with the books and the consumer tend to believe the reviews more than they do any other professional opinion on the books, even more than half of them are casual comments by the readers of the book. The filters employed by the amazon.com allow you to see all the books for which a customer has either written a review or has bought. So actually if you tend to agree upon with some unknown customer you can just traverse his preferred list of books.

Expert Opinion-

Marketing filters also provide customers’ an expert endorsement to directly choose from a huge range of products. Interesting implementations of these kinds of filters are visible in the organized book retail chain “Crosswords”. They have a separate section of books which are assorted from the books in their stock and kept as “Sriram Recommends”. Many customers buy books just because of the strong filter, that the books are recommended by the CEO of the bookstore himself and trust his opinion as a voracious reader. They prefer to buy books which are endorsed by an expert opinion.

As consumer options continue to increase, the filter will gain even more significance in the marketing domain. The ultimate insight would be creation of niche as narrow as an individual, then the filters would rule. For example, homogenized, stereotype models of computers are slowly being replaced by a multi-option, self customizable and convenient form. When the options grow wider, our focus naturally narrows to find the perfect fit, and marketing filters are steps ahead in the same direction. Lisa Johnson has talked about different ways these marketing filter actually be implemented in the organizations.

1. Create filters in both "practical" and "passion" categories

Progressive Insurance has made it easy to filter through the benefits of all the available insurance offers. It's a welcome solution for a boring, yet necessary purchase. On the other end of the pendulum swing, fans will spend hours and days consulting filters in their passion categories, including books, fashion, music, gaming, travel, sports, collectables and politics.

2. Build a forum for customer opinions

How can you gather and leverage customer opinion data? Think about how brands like eBay, Amazon and Epinions have made minor celebrities out of their top reviewers.

3. Develop an influential insider

Consider creating an internal brand personality who shares her favorite purchases. For example, a travel company could profile its CEO and ask her to share favorite vacation destinations, packing tips, luggage criteria and the best ways to re-book a canceled flight or avoid travel headaches.

4. Filter out the unnecessary

Sometimes, knowing what not to buy is more valuable than information on what to purchase. The trusted author of The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy has released a shoppers' guide to steer new moms through the dizzying array of products available for their little ones. New moms appreciate the scoop on what's essential to buy new and what's OK to pick up used or to just forget altogether.

So now we can see that there is a way by which we can clutter through a series of assortments and offer consumer a good and interesting solution through these techniques of suggestive marketing. I have strong belief that in the era of customization and varied choices these would be the voice of the new age marketing.