The Privatisation of Consumption: Marketing Media through Sensory Modalities

Abstract

Marketers have heralded a major shift in the way products and brands are currently marketed to consumers. Rather than marketing a product or brand on its rational or functional attributes, such as touting a car's horsepower, agility or smooth ride, marketers now sell brands on their experiential or emotional dimensions, such as the sensations offered from driving the car brand. This shift towards ‘experiential marketing’ has not only affected the advertising end-product of executions, the advertising research process, but has also spurred new modes and models for advertising media planning. To wit, the linear and sequential model of media persuasion is being replaced by more open-ended, experiential models. Have marketers tapped into a new personalised way to approximate the consumer, or are these merely revised means of objectifying the consumer? This paper explores these dimensions and looks at what the changes in media models and consumer representations mean to marketers.