Merchandise is an incredible thing, but to truly understand why it is so impressive, you will first need a solid grasp of what merch is, as well as the core ideas behind selling products and marketing. This article aims to cover these topics and use them to explain why merch is so singularly useful.
What Is Merch?
Merchandise is a uniquely useful product sold by your business to your customers. Merch is branded or somehow alluding to your business, and you can only really get away with selling merch if your business actively produces fans rather than customers per se. This means that generally speaking, merch is sold by businesses such as sports, bands, entertainers, or movie producers – the kinds of mediums where people are most interested in attaching themselves to the brand. Merch is rarely even made by the company selling it, often being outsourced to businesses such as anthembranding.com that produce the merch for the companies to sell.
Why Is Marketing So Effective?
Marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to any business looking to grow its customer base, and there is a good reason for that. Marketing works to bring the attention of potential customers towards the product you want them to buy. This is typically so effective because your product should be designed to meet a gap in the market, meaning your product should be something that your potential customers already want. By letting them know that it exists already and is available to them right now, you trigger all of their pent-up desire for the product and often cause near-immediate sales of your product to your customers.
The Importance of Selling Products
It is fairly obvious that selling products is kind of the entire purpose of any business. The revenue generated by these sales is what offsets the costs of running your company, and anything left afterward is considered the profits generated by those sales. So, selling products is the core of the business, and without that core, there would be no business. After all, you wouldn’t have cost if you weren’t producing products to sell, which you wouldn’t have to produce if you weren’t trying to sell them.
Why Is Merch So Uniquely Useful?
Understanding all of this, why is merch such a powerful product? Well, it all comes down to merch’s ability to blend the two most integral parts of any business endeavor together.
The Blending of Sales and Marketing
Merchandise, by its very nature, is a product. It is sold by a business to a customer who then owns the item. However, this also works to market the business in two ways. Firstly, the product is branded or in some way references the business, which means anyone who sees it will be reminded of the business. Secondly, if the owner of the merch is ever asked about the product, they will likely end up providing the company with positive word-of-mouth marketing.
This means that, bizarrely, merch is the only kind of marketing where the customer pays the company to advertise their products.
