Promoting a Product
Promotion is a psychological operation. To promote a product, a marketer must first understand how the human mind works. Thereafter, he must design promotional activities that goes along with the workings of the human mind, not for the exploitation of consumers but for the mutual benefit.
There is an old canon that marketing is about creating a perception in consumers' mind. But perceptions need not always be a fact: they become fact only by chance and not by definition. And if you are creating a perception that is not a fact, you are essentially cheating consumers. Marketing should be about creating perception only if the perception is true.
All promotional activities must have a goal and satisfy three conditions — that they must interact with as many of target's sensory faculties, that their effects must be long lasting and they must be thought provoking to consumers. These are indeed difficult conditions to satisfy, but activities adhering to these conditions are extremely potent.
Advertising is just a minor subset of marketing that some companies does not use at all. It is one of the least potent and most expensive activities aimed at promoting a brand or product. Better promotional activities exist, only that you must know how to design and use them.
In the history of mankind, one can find several great almost perfect products that have lasted for many years with few variations in design. Among them, there is one product that has scaled the principles of product design and marketing like no other product has. This product is religion. Religious leaders are the greatest marketers ever and the functioning of religious organisations are the greatest marketing plans ever devised. Three of them constitute the ultimate case study for marketing and product design.