The Analysis of Hard-Selling and Soft-Selling Marketing Strategies Toward Buying Interest for Sustainable Business Development

The increasing growth of companies has led to the increasingly fiercer business competition, in which company must design the right marketing strategy to increase its sales. Marketing strategy is a marketing communication including hard selling and soft selling. This study aims to measure the differences in the effectiveness of hard-selling and soft-selling marketing communication methods in attracting buying interest. The research adopts a survey approach with a descriptive quantitative method and a comparative research type. Data collection used a questionnaire distributed online to individuals from Generation Z (18-23 years old) in West Java. The sample was determined using the purposive sampling method, resulting in 80 respondents. The soft sell indicator shows a minimum score of 9 and an average of 15.23 as well as the hard-selling indicator that shows a minimum score of 6, with an average of 14.93. This means that the soft-selling marketing techniques are more effective to attract people's attention. Then, 46.3% of respondents start interested in buying products after seeing the ad with a soft-selling marketing technique and 73.8% or 59 respondents were interested in buying the advertised product with hard-selling marketing techniques. The findings indicate that factors with hard-selling marketing techniques have a more significant influence on purchasing effectiveness or consumer buying interest compared to soft-selling marketing techniques.