Impulse Advertising

According to OgilvyAction Shopper Marketing
“A recent study revealed that 38%* of purchase decisions are unplanned, and that only 5% of consumers are actually loyal to one brand. In fact, 68% of consumers are perennial 'switchers', swayed by price cuts, promotions, curiosity, and even their mood.**”

I believe in impulse buying, and that when a person sees an ad s/he should be able to instantly access the service without having to write it on his/her shopping list or try and remember the ad s/he saw on TV when at points of purchase; the conventional remedy to this is shopper marketing. There are however, much more ways to promote impulse buying; yes a shelf-talker allows you to directly pick up the product communicated, so does a vending machine, but there are plenty of other ways for allowing customers to instantly get what they see.

I would say the next step in shopper marketing is something I would like to call ‘impulse advertising’ a new breed of advertising that allows instant access to the products communicated.

Several companies have already started to cater to this need like

shoptext which allows customers to buy an item instantly by sending a text message, and qode which allows people to take a photo of a code (on an ad) using their mobile phone and they are instantly directed to a certain website using mobile internet.

We also have the same problem online, for example when you click on a web banner or online ad for a book, you get directed to the home page of the book with details on the author etc, but why not be instantly be directed to the check-out page at

amazon where the item is already in your cart and all you need to do is pay. All marketers think that people want more and more information about products, when a lot of the time people just have the impulse to buy, and the more details and red-tape they are exposed to the more time they have to reconsider their impulse killing the spontaneity.

On the same note, why can’t you have products that you can instantly buy (with a click) in online games? For example why not have a bookstore in

Second Life in which you can buy books in both the virtual world and reality (amazon is already working on such a project, click here for details)?

Our ads should be more interactive to cater for impulse buying, and with telecom operators and the internet, it has become very easy to do so. A simple example would be linking the internet or a phone to ads whereby you can click a button on the ad and insert your location to order the product advertised (this can be done on a range of media from lightboxes in malls, to bathroom ads in clubs) you can prepay by credit card or cash upon delivery.“With the click of a button” is the motto typically used for advertising all online transactions when in fact you need to log into a website, type something like 50 words and 30 clicks to get to what you want. Instant