In order to sell a product or service, you must create its value from your expenses, determine a price, convey your price to consumers, and then make a profit. If your expenses are high, you can set a higher price to make a larger profit, but if your expenses are lower, you should lower your price or reduce costs to maximize your profits. So, is it possible to profit if your expenses are high but the price is low?

People do not believe in what they do not know. If they don’t listen, they won’t know. If it isn’t interesting, they won’t listen.

That’s why marketing plays a role in making a product or service known in order to attract a large number of consumers and create sales. No matter how good a product or service is, it will not sell if it is not known. Marketing, therefore, has a more important role. Although it is not something that shows results immediately, marketing creates a brand and maximizes the value of the product or service.

In recent years, social media marketing, which is great for spreading information quickly with a strong influence, has become increasingly noticed by many businesses. However, the majority of businesses do not achieve their expected performance compared to the traffic they get and eventually stop trying. As their marketing efforts progressed, they were expecting generated sales. Many businesses that fail in social marketing believe those who succeed are just lucky or have good fortune.

Of course, marketing without success is failed marketing. If you do not get the expected results from what you have put in, would this be considered a marketing failure? We should not forget that there are more important things in marketing that we cannot see immediately.

Most businesses expect to see the same results as the effort they put into investments. Through marketing, we strive to create traffic to spread information about our products and services to make sales quickly. In that case, we would be successful in the first half of the marketing phase. This is because we have been marketing our products and services to consumers. However, there is another component in order to make sales. We must constantly imprint our products or services on the consumers. Initially, consumers may be interested in a product or service when they first come upon it, but there is a great possibility they will forget about it unless they see it again.

Therefore, if they constantly see a product, they will become aware of the brand. If they need a similar product in the future, if someone they know purchased the product, or they see someone share the product, they will seriously consider purchasing the product themselves. If a few sales are made and the consumer has a satisfactory experience, this will eventually lead to more sales. This is similar to viral marketing in which consumers tell others about a product through word-of-mouth. If you give up on marketing because you are not getting the results or sales that you expected, it's the same as giving up the initial interest a consumer had in your product or service.

Investing in something that has an invisible performance does, in fact, require a great deal more determination. When we calculate the value of marketing, we must recognize not only the visible performance but also the invisible performance. The only way to see the true effect of marketing is through persistence. Although you may not see results right now, if you maximize your brand value, in the future you will be able to say that your marketing was a success rather than a failure.

Weekly Column: 2017-06-16