All of marketing is a battle of perception, not products! More specifically, marketing is about positioning the product or service in a positive light in the minds of the consumers that each company wants to reach. Because consumers are bombarded with so many messages on a daily basis, they routinely sift through the “noise.” According to the “Selective Perception Marketing”, consumers actively block or modify messages that conflict with their values and attitudes.
If we take two people who witness a single event and ask them about what happened, they will likely give different stories according to their values, ideas, attitudes, thoughts, roles and statuses. In other words, people selectively perceive what they expect and hope to see. Colgate very successfully applied this finding in its advertising campaign in order to promote a new product. At the image everybody observed the food on the teeth of the man and nobody observed that the woman has 6 fingers! The purpose of this campaign was to persuade the consumers that a problem at somebody’s teeth is more observable than anything else. Due to the nature of the product (dental care) everybody expected to see a brilliant smile and for this reason, they focused on the mouth without paying attention at the whole image.
That’s why creativity makes the difference!