There’s more to marketing than advertising. Implicit marketing refers to whatever is done to attract customers to your product in an indirect way, as opposed to explicitly promoting it. By avoiding heavy handed product praise and putting more emphasis on the mindset of the purchaser, it can address consumer concerns more deeply.

Implicit marketing requires a bit of subtlety. The hackneyed application of the common techniques in this area, such as shoe-horned celebrity endorsements or obtrusive logo placement, may cause your messaging to lose its punch over time. To make implicit marketing work for you, you need to take into account your brand, your product, and features of the target group. This groundwork pays off, making implicit marketing less artificial and more compelling.

Between Products & Branding

Branding matters. No matter how big your business is, its survival deeply depends on how potential customers will evaluate you, and these impressions are often formed before they closely look at your products and prices. However, while most businesses suffer if their brand is starved for attention, it’s important not to come off as needy. 

At the end of the day, the product, whether as concrete as a toaster or as abstract as an account, is your bread and butter. But as any good sales person knows, pushy and braggadocios product descriptions won’t get you far with a savvy consumer.

Enter implicit messaging, which lets you have your cake and eat it too. By swapping or augmenting explicit product praise with character-giving contents which allow consumers to draw their own conclusions, you can implicitly influence potential customers in your favour, and with more long-term desirable effects.

Implicit marketing tactics may include:

• …associating your product with something else desirable.

• …building trust by identifying and discussing goals of the target audience.

• …implying customer satisfaction through stories or images.

• …crafting a narrative into which your product implicitly fits.

Implicit marketing is a happy medium between general brand awareness initiatives and explicit product descriptions.

Customer Preferences: Fixed or Flexible?

Implicit messaging is a matter of degree, since the obviousness of the message can vary depending on how heavily or lightly implied it is. That adjustability pretty useful when it comes to dealing with customer preferences.

Suppose you’re a consumer sitting at home thinking about what you want, setting your priorities and preferences, and then looking for the relevant goods available in the market. How do you go about it?

Two Pictures

According to one picture, you already have a solid idea of what you want, and businesses simply responding to these preferences by showing that their product meets your needs. According to another picture, people constantly form preferences as they are exposed to new items, in which case businesses focus not just on satisfying desires, but creating them.

A Middle Road

The truth is probably somewhere in between these two pictures. Consumers don’t have their purchasing preferences etched in stone, nor are they easily persuadable blank slates just waiting for the right ad to come along. Implicit marketing can help you find the middle ground by neither taking purchasing preferences as given, nor striving to totally change these preferences to push your product. 

Subjectifying Consumers

Implicit marketing accomplishes this by focusing on a tactical description of the lives of the target groups in a way that leads to a conclusion that they are expected to draw indirectly. From a writing perspective, this can be done by making careful choices about terminology, choosing expressions that rely on certain leading metaphors.

For example, if you’re selling a product to treat arthritis, a lot might ride on whether you talk about those “battling arthritis”, “struggling with arthritis”, or the more neutral “managing arthritis”. “Battling” evokes a military stance, and the implicit message is that the consumers should get armored professionally instead of relying on their own defensive resources .

Implicit messaging works best if you can show your target audience that you understand their concerns. Properly deployed, it can empower consumers. However, a lot of care needs to be taken, as irresponsible messaging can result in the emergence of pseudo-problems or negative reactions in customers if not approached cautiously. 

Beyond Needs

A common marketing practice is to present your product as a necessity. This can be done by explicitly referring to new products as must-haves or by posing rhetorical questions to suggest to the intended audience that the product is widely regarded as essential. 

Given the fierce competition in the business world, some companies may be tempted to overuse this strategy, introducing everything they produce as the best response to a life necessity. But people are also interested in non-essential goods, and your implicit marketing strategy should reflect this. Moreover, eliciting a feeling of advantage in customers can itself an important influential factor in making a sale.

Non-essential goods are are what they sound like, and lie in the gap between necessities and high-end luxury goods. There’s no catch-all definition of a non-essential good, and whether a consumer thinks of a product as essential or not may effect their purchasing behavior.

With implicit messaging, you can capitalize on this through carefully chosen language of de-necessitation. This works by highlighting what has only recently been made possible, what old constraints your product can allow you to bypass, etc. By drawing on consumer curiosity, you can indirectly highlight product benefits while empowering consumer choice and  increasing the percieved reliability of the seller.

For example, suppose you’re selling vegan “impossible burgers”. Expecting others to accept the environmental or moral necessity of cultured meat products is probably a bad sales strategy. Instead, you can tactfully underline how cool it is that people now have more options for making decisions about what to eat. This can expand your audience to curious consumers, without alienating committed vegans and vegetarians.

The Art Of Implicit Marketing

Marketing is an art, not a science, and that goes for implicit marketing. Crafting a message with a target audience in mind requires finesse at the best of times, and this is even more true when that message is implied, rather than stated outright.

But the payoff, in terms of subtlety and flexibility, is worth it. Implicit marketing lets you meet the consumer where they’re at, influencing their purchasing preferences without treating them like a blank slate. It also forms a happy medium between brand work and explicit advertising, empowering the consumer and increasing trust.