"Stop advertising and start selling"

10 July 2014. The animated short films of the “Little Green Bags” demonstrate what corporate responsibility, entrepreneurship, innovation, social media and the energy turnaround are all about. Tying in with the academic seminars accompanied by a snack, the so-called “brown bag lunches”, the “Little Green Bags” video series provides morsels of knowledge.

“Marketing is more than brand cultivation”

The sixth film in the video series explains how “Real Marketing” leads customers to make a purchase in spite of daily overstimulation. The authors of the spoken text, Prof. Dr. Christian Belz and Marc Rutschmann from the Institute of Marketing (IfM-HSG), explain why the identification world of marketing is usually ineffective.

The action world is more target-oriented: what influences customers on their long and stony path to a purchase decision? How can it be ensured that they do not turn back too early or wander off course? “Promises kept, visits to the factory and successfully handled complaints create customers for eternity,” reveal investigations conducted by the team of authors. Their research results are partially based on findings in neurobiology. They recently presented their purchase-process-oriented marketing approach in a book entitled "Real marketing. Leading customers to a purchase: purchase process, purchase action, success".

Both authors assume that the effect of brands is overestimated. A further basic assumption is that purchasers usually do not behave rationally along the lines of homo oeconomicus; they often purchase an article without having methodically weighed up its advantages and disadvantages in advance. The type that is predominantly found on the market is the “homo volaticus”, whose behaviour is characterised by habit and opportunism, as the NZZ (4 June 2014) pointedly put it in a book review. The upshot of it all: using marketing as a part of the distribution process is more conducive to sales figures than regarding distribution as a part of marketing.

Digital titbit 

The HSG’s “Little Green Bags” invites viewers to find out more about the University’s fields of knowledge. The issues of digital life, energy turnaround, sustainability, innovation and entrepreneurship provide topics for discussions in society, trade and industry, and politics. They are therefore also an important component of research and teaching at the HSG.

The series was launched by the Institute for Business Ethics with the film about corporate social responsibility, “What is CSR?” The Institute of Technology Management illustrated the principle of effectuation and the ten myths of entrepreneurship. The fourth part explained how innovations occur. In the fifth video, “Digital Good Life”, Miriam Meckel showed how we can combine the digital and analogue worlds without any techno stress. The films are produced in cooperation with the Zurich animation studio Zense and film director Andri Hinnen, himself a graduate of the University of St.Gallen. The Academic Director of the animation film series is Prof. Dr. Thomas Beschorner, Director of the Institute for Business Ethics at the HSG.

Picture: Zense