Your Clients are Petty, Little Monsters
Nails on a chalkboard. Bright purple and orange together. Mariah Carey singing the word "moist".
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Just thinking about these stimuli can make you cringe. But annoyances like these lurk around most marketplaces, driving away customers.
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This article digs into sensation issues like these that are common in the brick-and mortar marketplace and explains how to deal with them.
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A Look Into the Writing Process
Original Piece:
Changing Commute Methods in L.A. by Cash Only Systems
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Your Clients are Petty Little Monsters: Enhancing Marketplace Stimuli was my Repurposing Project for the Minor in Writing. In this project, we picked a piece of old writing and recreated the argument for a different audience. Here, you can see my step-by-step process, from the original piece which I repurposed, to the feedback from my peers and instructor, all the way to the final draft.
This piece presents a subtle solution to the problem of air pollution in Los Angeles. By prohibiting gas stations from accepting non-cash payments, the local Los Angeles government could sidestep the vicious political process behind taxing gas while reducing incentives to drive within the most susceptible socioeconomic groups. This idea of human behavior changing based off of a simple alteration in marketplace stimuli drove me to research sensory marketing for my new piece.
Rough Draft
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I was concurrently working on a comparison of Amazon to Costco with my Rough Draft, so I found myself caught up in the comparison between the brick-and-mortar stimuli to that of the online industry. My research at this point was quite shallow for that reason; I found difficulty addressing independent retailors through this sentiment because, as many carry novel products to compete with the predictability of chains, they themselves connect with many consumers online, finding those who desire their unique offerings.
Rough Draft
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Peer and Instructor Reviews
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My Peer Reviews reflected the fact that I needed to focus more on optimizing the individual stimuli rather than offering solutions to compete with online retailors my differentiating stimuli. They also encouraged me to bring the humorous, casual feel up a notch because of the online, how-to genre.
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Meeting with my instructor, Shelley, I was again encouraged to keep the voice casual, while expanding my content to include a few more topics. She also helped me explain scientific and business jargon to my invoked audience who may not be as familiar with these terms.
Final Draft
I added a personal anecdote to the final revision, along with an extended section on Visual Stimuli. I also included more visuals and specific examples of companies and their stimuli to illustrate the correlation between sensation and perception.
