When your product is a sleek, exciting gadget that blows its predecesssors generation away or a flashy new application that is exactly what everyone wants, creating hype is pretty easy. People are always looking forward, seeking the next big thing and trying to stay ahead of the masses, so consumers often obsess over promising new technology and beg for beta keys for the next big web application.
But what about the little guy—the guy who offers something that people really need, but that just isn’t that interesting? Marketing a product that people are bound to glance over is certainly challenging, but not impossible. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the need that must be fulfilled before any other is considered important is physiological needs—food, shelter, safety, social acceptance and all the other things that keep us alive as individuals and a species. With that being said, it would seem that the things that keep this need tended to—food, cleaning products and the like—should be really easy to market, right? Not so much.
Keeping this need filled is pretty easy in most of the developed world today, even if you are struggling, which allows people to almost constantly focus on higher “needs” which fuel things such as human curiosity. People constantly need things that are interesting or stimulating in one way or another, and dynamic products can easily market through this.
If your product fulfills a basic need, however, you need to determine what desire it can fill for your potential customers. Lysol, for example, doesn’t expect people to be interest in cleansing products and, instead, focuses on people’s desire to keep a clean home. By finding what people can achieve with your product that will matter to them, you can focus a successful marketing campaign with a lot of creative potential, as it will be based upon not only a product but a concept that people are already passionate about.
