Trends

Marketing continues to evolve, what once a simple poster has now turned into dramatic commercials and infiltrative spies trying to figure out what sells the best. We have virtually no control over what is seen and heard today because these companies have purposely caused it to be this way. The advertising battle between the companies has made it so that no matter where you are there is a way to sell you something. Now companies have to target certain types of people because of how much advertisement is out there. Without targeting certain crowds many of the advertisement would fall in the shadows of others since there would be no purpose for it to reach, nor direction in which it is trying to follow. This forces advertisers to create the most pleasurable, exciting, attention-grabbing ad they can imagine while targeting a large enough crowd to sell their product but also make it personal enough to be highly noticed by that targeted group. As we see many of the beer companies fit their advertisements to middle age men mainly because they have found that men tend to drink more beer. There are many scenarios in which advertisements are targeted towards broad groups of people, yet this still is not quite good enough for many companies. They now have the capabilities of tracking our spending habits and statistically figuring out what we might want to buy next. In today’s technological lifestyle companies, such as target, can gain access to your computer and other devices to see what products you have recently purchased or even talked about through Facebook or Twitter. They then create a personal shopping list that is based upon your passed purchases and designed to sell you the products you may need next in the future. This has its benefits by saving time not having to look through articles and coupons to find what you need, instead it already knows what you are going to get and creates a personal list that you may use. This also has many privacy issues though. The idea that a store can know so much about you that they already know what you are going to buy shows how much access they have to your personal lives. To me it doesn’t seem worth the convenience it offers.