Surface marketing is what you see everywhere around you.
It tries to get your attention through interruption.
# When you are watching an IPL match on TV, you are being interrupted with an ad.
# When you are watching YouTube, you are interrupted by an ad.
# When you are reading a newspaper or magazine, you are interrupted by an ad.
# When you are listening to the radio, you are interrupted by an ad.
# When you are browsing websites online, you are interrupted by an ad.
# When you are driving on the road, you are interrupted by a hoarding.
This is an interruption.
Forced attention.
You don’t pay attention because you want to. You pay attention because it is difficult to ignore it.
It’s like one old school friend, that you do not really like who comes and talks to you at a party and you cannot ignore him.
You tolerate it for a while. Low-quality attention.
Also Read : Deep Marketing
Such is the low-quality attention that surface marketing achieves.
No one wants to give forced attention. And no one should want such type of attention on themselves.
All the interruptions that you see above, are surface-level marketing.
The medium doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it is a digital medium or a traditional medium.
Surface level marketing has a lot of problems.
With surface marketing…
a) Trust is not built using ads.
b) People cannot recall a brand through ads because now there are too many brands trying to get people to recall.
c) If 100s of brands keep running ads right in front of your face, you will ignore all of them. Won’t remember any of them. Everyone is screaming for attention.
d) Surface level marketing communicates “What” is the product. It doesn’t communicate “Why” the customer needs the product. Why you made the product in the first place. You cannot educate a customer using interruption ads.
e) The attention that surface marketing gets from people is of poor quality. People are not really looking forward to paying quality attention to these ads.
Author – Ankita Mundhra