Share This Article
Newsletter
Guest post by Joyce Del Rosario and Jasper Dela Cruz. Don’t forget to share if you enjoy it
“Marketing,” as we should all know, is the act of promoting and selling products or services. Suffice to say, one should be good in promoting a product in order for the said product to be sold. Any practitioner of marketing should know how to present the product to the customer in such a way that the said customer would actually say to him/herself that he/she cannot live without the product. Therefore, marketing begins with grabbing a prospective customer’s attention.
That’s a tall order, if you ask me. I mean, you could just take a stroll down any mall and, within minutes, I bet you’d see people handing out flyers to random folk who would just toss the flyers into the nearest garbage bin without having to look at what was written on it. Let’s review that scene. Let’s see, the poor guy handing out the flyers would be the marketing practitioner, the ass-hats who just threw the flyers would be the prospective customers, and the flyers would be the tools used in promoting products. Obviously, without knowing what was written on the flyer, no one would give even a thoughtful stare about the product, much less buy it. So, now, we are faced with the main problem: How does one grab someone’s attention?
Luckily, with the age of information technology, we are given new tools that we can use to pop someone’s eyes out and glue them to whatever the hell is that we are selling. The days of people standing in malls giving out flyers are slowly dwindling away (unless, of course, those standing would be women in brightly colored bikinis, but that’s beside my point.) Also, millions of trees would be saved from being cut down and turned into colored papers that people are so obsessively fixated on distributing.
Let’s start with the most obvious tool, the Internet. The Internet has given us the power of connecting with people, the power to share pictures without having to worry about the cost of printing it and manually sending it to everyone. One could easily just upload an image taken from a high-resolution camera and everyone can see it (provided that the one who uploaded the picture wants the image to be viewed by everyone). Moreover, with most of the people spending more time connected to the Internet rather than having to break a sweat walking, advertising has fallen into the hands of new-media. The Internet has single-handedly changed the game of advertising by presenting us with the power to free ourselves from block letters on mono-chromatic paper and immersing us into a world of colors with so many shades people start using a mix of letters and numbers to name them.
The next tool is the number of software used to enhance pictures, the most famous of which would be, from the software company Adobe, the Photoshop. With Photoshop, we can manipulate colors and make eye candies so sweet anyone viewing your creation would die from diabetes. That is, of course, if you knew, at the very least, what the Magic Wand Tool is for.
The sad thing about the internet, however, is that some of us has developed an attention span that sometimes do not last beyond 140 characters (thanks, Twitter). What with all the bombardment from banners and pop-ups and basically everything that happens inside a single window, coupled with the amazing ability of the human mind to only focus on one thing at a time, only the best image can grab an Internet surfer’s attention.
But, wait, there’s more. Grabbing a viewer’s attention is not just about getting the most color into one image; it’s not about literally making the viewer’s eyes bleed. Sometimes, it’s also about how other-worldly an image is in terms of it being possible in the real world. This is where image editing comes in. This is perhaps the most sought after feature of Photoshop that gives the power to create surreal worlds and events which never happened – and perhaps never will. Imagine, a television with butterfly wings gliding through a sky of red water above green clouds. You can’t? Well, let Photoshop help you with that.
With Lighting tools, an impressive Feather option, and the ability to select colors in a given range, you can say goodbye to over-priced studios with their chroma keys and make stunning images using your grandmother’s camera. Photoshop can be learned in various ways, most schools train their students in using this proprietary software, it can also be learned in one’s own town, and some IT consultantsoffer training for a fee.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. This would prove to be a problem given that people always have their own views in anything. Heck, even the word of the Lord was interpreted four times! So, let’s avoid confusion and help the person looking at your image by using the right words and inserting them in your image. This option is also very much possible with Photoshop. With just a single click of a tool, you can easily type in words without altering the image you’re describing. Also, you can edit the way the words appear on the picture, not just the color, but also the texture, the orientation, and so on.
Indeed, marketing has evolved drastically in the years of the Internet. But, the basic principle of luring customers still remains the same. Captivate the viewers and show them something new, something fresh, something that they need, something that you are selling. Lure them in with the mixture of colors, the shock factor of images, the focal points of words. All of these can be done with basic knowledge in Adobe’s Photoshop. Now, imagine the sheer impact when one utilizes its power.
Joyce Del Rosario and Jasper Dela Cruz are business bloggers. They blog for officekonsulenterne.dk. They focus on equipping business owners with business software knowledge. Aside from blogging, Jasper is also a toy enthusiast.
Creative Commons Image courtesy of ?CubaGallery