Marketing Alpha

It seems kinda strange that we could think about education as a business….as stated in My’s Blog

While it is rather convincing that most schools are simply corporations seeking out profits, I would argue that they are somewhat forced to charge such fees. The real reason why we pay is prestige, but the reason why there is prestige is because we pay. It is a privilege that one can attend Harvard for university, or a privilege that one can become a professor at UBC.  But a university can only be as good as the students attending, and normally, the best students are a minute population from all over the world that are willing and able to pay for good education. This is why Harvard can charge such extreme education fees.

If Harvard did not attract the brightest minds every single year, their institution would not be well branded.

Whether this is ethical or not…I would say it is. If Harvard did not receive excessive tuition fees every year, they would not able to finance the research and projects they produce. In the end, everything tends to return back to society in the form of services. It’s just not visible to us sometimes.

Interestingly, we don’t really know what we want unless we get to compare things

Please skip to 13:00 🙂

After watching this part of the video, you will realize that there are instances in which our decisions can be influenced through comparison.

Dan Ariely gives us three options:

As you can see from The Economist, a well respected magazine, they put a redundant option of print subscription, charging $125 while charging $125 for print and web subscription.

Is it useless? We find out that it’s not!

It was found from this study that after taking out the dominated option, only 32% preferred the print and web subscription. Dan Ariely suggests to us that this is because we compare our choices; we rank our best one based on other alternatives. If Printing is worth $125, then i should definitely get print and web subscription for $125! But if they don’t tell me that the print option is worth $125, then I can simply assume that I’m paying $66 for the printed version.

This has HUGE implications for marketers! You can literally tell your customers what they want! Just charge two prices, and one bundling price. Dominated options aren’t so useless afterall 😉

So I’m listening to the radio, and the ads come up.

First kudos, then something about skin care, then business, business, business, business….

What?! Why is ‘business’ repeated at least once every sentence?!

I should have known better…CIBC…

I’m wondering whether this is a new marketing tactic, simply repeating the word ‘business’ to brand itself around the concept of business and finance. I highly doubt that it’s a coincidence, since these guys spend a lot of money just to get some air time on the radio.

The effect is that  you kinda subconsciously relate CIBC to business. CIBC uses this tactic to consolidate their brand position in their customers’ mind. I find it useful, as long as people don’t realize what you’re doing. Once people find out, it kinda gets a bit boring in my opinion. It’s like the magician’s trick; when you don’t know how they do it you’re amazed, but once you find out about it their trick doesn’t have any effect on you.

For me, it doesn’t really make me think of CIBC as more business-like than I already do, I just find the ad’s repetition of ‘business’ to be very amusing.

I really wish that I have an audio clip of the ad….but unfortunately I don’t! 🙁

This post is dedicated as a reply to Professor Cubbon’s blog post

In his post, Professor Cubbon challenges marketers to evaluate the Old Spice video. I believe it can be looked at from two angles.

Awareness:

I’ve always thought of the Old Spice commercial to be successful in creating humor, but I never really thought about it to have created value for its product. Sure, I’m now aware of the Old Spice brand, and I’m aware that P&G owns it, but I have always been aware of this brand. It is hard to argue with a 2700% increase in Twitter followers, or a 300% increase traffic to www.oldspice.com.

Sales:

However, we must be aware that while awareness has definitely improved, nothing has really changed for sales. Looking at P&G’s financial statements, they seem to be hovering at an average of 78 billion dollars of sales revenue, which suggests that the video has not proven itself successful yet.

Our Conclusion?

From the analysis, we seem to be able to quickly conclude that the ad was not very successful in boosting sales. Though people like the humor, they’re not willing to pay for it. I myself, being a guy very concerned with the way he smells, have never thought about buying Old Spice after seeing the video. It just hasn’t entered my ‘evoked set’ of consideration yet.

However, if there’s one thing I learned in marketing, it’s that we should be patient with the results. The fact is, it’s only been 2 years since the ad has been launched, and the immediate effects have not yet been felt. Though we may be turning impatient, brand awareness has actually led to people knowing the brand as opposed to not knowing it, and thus increases the likelihood that they will buy Old Spice. It’s not a garuntee, but a likelihood is better than no likelihood, right?

A quote I learned from marketing really stuck to me…it goes:

“Branding is the promise you make, your brand is the promise you keep.”

I really liked this quote because I believe that it holds a lot of truth and validity, and thus I began to think more about branding as a whole. I used to believe that branding was about how people thought about you, but then people don’t just simply generate random ideas about others. Most of their thoughts are deduced directly from your actions. A one time thing doesn’t quite cut it either, you must be consistent.

So the best strategy for branding really isn’t about getting the word about yourself out there, it’s about doing something over and over and over again until people know you for it.

Say you win a Math competition once, but never again. Contrast this with someone who wins consistently. Who has a stronger brand in mathematics?

I guess in some ways that’s what a degree does for you. Most people nowadays say it’s ‘all about experience’ and that degrees are just ‘for show’. In some ways, it could be, but at the same time your degree helps exemplify your brand. It’s just another way to add on to people’s image of you. If you have a degree in Accounting, your brand will be that similar to an Accountant. If you have a degree in Marketing, your brand will be that of a marketer. Of course, real-life work experience and results contribute heavily towards your brand as well, but degrees seem to be good add ons in this respect.

When a company goes through their IPO, they are enlisted on the stock exchange for people to buy a share of their company. These people are granted the title of ‘shareholders’ of that particular company. Their share value will then go up and down depending on how well the company does and how they treat their shareholders.

Now extract from your mind the idea of company shareholding, and replace it with celebrity shareholding. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could buy shares of a celebrity who is not-so famous, and watch his value rise? For example, seeing potential in Leonard Di Caprio in his early days of filming, and being a big fan of him and believing that he would become a huge hit movie star one day….thus seeing his stock value rise.

All this is possible through the newly found Hollywood Stock Exchange!

You can now buy shares of Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt and see their values rise!

What’s amazing isn’t really the process, but the results.

Apparently, this stock exchange is the MOST accurate predictor of the values celebrities ARE actually worth on the market. By gathering feedback from consumers directly through a quick automated stock exchange system, valuable data can be used to translate into pricing information for marketers!

And it’s not just Hollywood that does this, think about Hockey Drafts and Football Manager as well! They all run by the same principles.

RE: The MarkeDer’s Blog Post

It’s pretty interesting seeing this post especially after our marketing midterms, where one of our questions was referring directly to Snooki and Coach paying her off with their competitor’s bags.

I just wanted to add that it’s not simply about the high ended brand that Coach wants to preserve; Snooki is also associated with a lot of legal proceedings. A judge even called her a ‘Linsday Lohan Wannabe”. It’s quite clear that Coach recognizes Snooki as a dissociative reference group for many people.

Nobody can deny the power of social media when it comes to marketing and advertising, but how powerful is it exactly?

I refer to the following site:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/14/eventbrite-facebook-share/

I quote from the website, “For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to a paid event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.”

A link shared on facebook is worth $2.52! My initial response was a feeling of surprise, for I did not think that each link share could be estimated at a value. I am wondering how Everbrite came up with this number, as I’m supposing they didn’t simply divide their total revenue by the number of facebook links they shared, or else the comparisons would be pointless as they could simply post more on Twitter and Linkedin to decrease their link values. If anyone has any idea as to how this figure was compiled, please reply 🙂

But assuming that the estimations are calculated on a valid basis, then it would be possible for companies to estimate their demand according to the number of times they post on facebook! Of course, not every event is the same, and each consumer has different preferences, but assuming that there are two seperate links for the old and new product, the customers that preferred the old product and don’t prefer the new would cancel out with the ones that didn’t prefer the old and prefer the new one. We would roughly arrive at a similar calculation, and the number of people who see the message would be roughly the same.

But this is not to say do not use Linkedin or Twitter; they still generate value! Be sure to use them as well along with facebook to maximize profits!

People who don’t like maths usually turn to marketing, but little do they know that they’ve turned towards the wrong direction.

In the world of marketing, numbers CAN BE everything.

When you people go into a new restaurant, plan to watch a new movie, or maybe even attend an event from facebook; the most common thing they think about is “is it worth doing?’ What’s a good indicator of whether something is worth doing other than a long review? Obviously, the number of people that go!

I’m sure you’ve heard of this highly publicized song:

The first time I listened to it was on youtube, when my friend messaged me in awe telling me the number of hits it received. At that time it was only at 100 million view, but since then it has really taken off. No doubt we should attribute a large portion of its success to Lady Gaga’s brilliant performance, but the point is that after a certain number of people started listening, a lot of people start joining just to see what all the fuss is about.

So what’s the moral? Get the word out there that a lot of people are using your product! People follow people naturally, so let them do so!

But this also brings up another interesting strategy; what if rumors about the number of people are part of your company are started, but are simply rumors? Let’s think about a simple example: CUS clubs. If a club such as the Business Communications Club started a false rumor about how the number of people joined their club exceed 200, then, following the theories posted, it is likely that a lot of other people will come and check the club out. Of course there are questions of ethics and morals, and whether people would believe the rumor or not, but if executed properly, and people DO believe, then people would be literally seeing what they believe, and thus believing what they are seeing.

We’ve all been approached by a customer service representative before.

But how many of us actually like it?

I think most business models make the assumption that more CSRs = better customer service. In reality, this is not entirely true. Think about all the times that you just wanted to quietly window shop, or the times that you just didn’t want to have to deal with people coming up to trying to hard-sell their products and asking with their not-so genuine tone ‘how are you today?’ or ‘what’s up man?’

What we as consumers hate – is being caught off by surprise. It’s just such a horrible feeling to have someone pops out of nowhere and starts selling a product that you never thought about buying it in the first place. Isn’t it so annoying?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that a firm having CSRs is a bad strategy. Afterall, who are customers going to go to if they have a question about certain products? But I think the approach that most CSRs take simply needs to change. Instead of being there to hard-sell their products and trying to catch customers off their guard; make sure that your approach is a bit more subtle and direct. Come in from the front so that they know you’re coming, and genuinely ask about their day. Simply asking “How are you?” and following it up with “Would you like to know more about our product” is simply not enough in my opinion.

This relates to Seth Godin’s recent blog post (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/do-you-actually-care-about-privacy.html) about privacy issues, and it has inspired me to think about examples where catching customers off guard is not a good thing.