The film “Squid Game” is taking over the screens of countless young viewers on Netflix. The story follows the fate of the male lead and 455 other players, all trapped in society’s most desperate circumstances, forced to join a game for a chance at a prize worth up to 45.6 billion Won.
As hyped as it is, few people realize that hidden beneath this film are some genuinely useful marketing lessons — let’s explore them with The Fool and the Easy Knowledge Channel team.
The first lesson likely comes from the game creators’ art of grasping customer psychology
In episode 1, there’s a scene where a young man in a suit tries to persuade Mr. Seong Gi-hun to join the game and win the massive prize. This young man moves our main character from a mindset of suspicion to a mindset of a winner, after several rounds of play in which the “customer” scores a windfall of 100,000 W…
Applying the art of grasping customer psychology in marketing campaigns
The customer journey map
According to the map above, the stage from Awareness to Consideration is when the customer sits in a zone of maximum suspicion toward the business. At this stage, a business must always assume the customer is testing the waters, showing attitude, or even holding certain prejudices…
One effective way to gather feedback and input from customers for an F&B business is to hand out samples (as The Fool and the Easy Knowledge Channel team covered in the article “Ronaldo’s Homecoming and the Business Lesson on Seizing Opportunity from Both Manchester United and Adidas”).
- For long-haul marketing campaigns (6 months to a year — for new businesses and products new to the market), a business should focus on these two stages: blog, email, word of mouth, and reviews.
- For short-term marketing campaigns (1–3 months — for businesses needing to solve short-term issues: inventory, perishable goods that need to sell fast, etc.), advertising activities should be pushed harder.
Putting the art of grasping customer psychology into practice for TP-Menswear
The challenge in the marketing campaign for TP-Menswear
Big E Co. took on the TP-Menswear project at the end of summer in the North and the dry season in the South — launching shorts products at that time wasn’t ideal at all. For that reason, Big E Co. had to run that campaign within just 1 month.
Kicking off the campaign and applying the art of grasping customer psychology
Getting to work, Big E Co. gave gift shorts from TP-Menswear to the first 50 lucky customers, so they could experience the product quality and send back appropriate feedback. The result was genuinely surprising: the post received over 400 comments without any paid advertising from Big E Co. at all.
Following the success of that post, Big E Co. began running ad posts precisely targeting the customer psychology already in demand for the product, achieving resounding success in subsequent campaigns that helped TP-Menswear sell through its entire inventory.
