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  • On Steven Brewer’s post: “Why Product Globalization Is Funny”
  • Alabhya Mandloi’s “Smart Phone Defies teenage LifeStyle.”
  • Positive Marketing
  • Luxury…The lack of advertisement for the better…. Or not?
  • Louis Vuiton and other exclusive stuff isn’t that exclusive
  • Some Vitamin Water commercials
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In his article, Steven, points out an interesting fact, how a bottle of American beer in the fancy packaging sells with 88 times higher price in China, compared to USA, it’s country of origin. With globalization today, I find the fact that things like that are possible particularly hilarious. If it happened once to China, who said it can’t happened to Canada, one day?… well, same thing already happened to Canada, on a much smaller scale, however it still did. Russian beer brand, Baltika, introduced its supreme lager “#3” to Canadian market with a retail price around 3 $ per bottle.

It comes to Canadian liquor stores into the section of fine European beers…However, it is treated completely different in Russia, country of origin. Baltika is considered to be a low cost brand, since just couple years ago it was still legal, to drink beer in public places, you would usually see a bottle of Baltika, which by the way costs just over 80 cents, in the hands of…..hmm… people you wouldn’t be friends with. It is an astonishment to me, how a product, can gain such a different value and move to a different class, just be changing price tag, and a continent….

I totally agree, with his point. It is well known that teenagers and young adults make up to a solid part in a smart phone market. It is us who tell their parent to buy a Blackberry instead of Nokia etc. It seems reasonable to address part of the marketing attention to a younger population, however, Motorola, is the first one, to fully tackle this. Yes, HTCs and BBs do advertise themselves from creatively/fresh point of view, but neither of them actually created a product that would fully reflect our lifestyle. I think, there is a big future for Motorola, as they really managed to differentiate their product from the rest of the market.

Every Ad, every marketing campaign which is done for business, always leaves me with bitter feelings. No matter how good or funny it is, I always have this feeling that beneath all of the positive commercial images, what they really trying to do is to make money of me. However recently, I stumbled upon a blog post about breast cancer awareness http://blogs.nfl.com/2010/10/04/think-pink/ , i discovered that marketing can serve business and actually “mean” good things under the cover of commercial images. NFL breast cancer support, is an amazing pice of marketing art. Not only it attracts new fan base to the game, and shows the stereotypical tough sport form a very soft and caring point of view, but it actually means what it sells.

It is so adorable to see huge guys tackling each other, bursting through the field and catching the football in their pink glove, cleats and helmets. A lot of critics argue that the money that has been put into manufacturing these “pink” goods would have been better off spent directly towards breast cancer, i strongly disagree with that. This is one of the greatest marketing campaigns (in my opinion), because it shows us the guy how important this issue is. These men, are ultimate Old Spice manliest men man, and they do care, so should the regular guys; and from my prospective, seeing these great men committed to such thing, while playing arguably one of the toughest sports ever to be played, definitely raised my breast cancer awareness. But again that’s just my opinion.

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It is true for most of the luxurious brands. Form consumers point of view, exclusive and luxurious goods shouldn’t be commonly seen, this applies to advertisements as well. When was the last time you’ve seen Vertu (phone), Azimut (boats) or Lamborghini (vehicles) commercial on TV? Well… never really; maybe Cosmopolitan or some other common magazine?…and the answer is “no” again. Companies that offer truly unique and luxurious goods don’t want publicity, because their biggest fear is that image of their product is going to become common. However, one of such companies chose a different, unique marketing campaign. Audi, introduced its’ new super sport vehicle R8 in 2006. Not only the marketing campaign but the whole approach of creating the vehicle was very unique, and time showed, really successful.

Audi approach in manufacturing this vehicle was to make it  not only the cheaper than its competitors but also most drivable in its class.

After the car was released in 2006 it won numerous awards, interestingly enough people didn’t really care about the price, the biggest emphasis was put on the ease of the driving, and use. Main problem of Porsches, Ferraris, and Aston Martins is that if it broke, chances are you would have to send the car to one of the few repair centers, for Audi its all different.  Audi is a big brand, with numerous services in every city.

Even though Audi is super common in most places as a car brand, it still managed to create a luxurious vehicle, with charisma and exclusive aura to it.  Company  also changed its view on traditional marketing for such product by showing many commercials in “regular” magazines, TV, it was even aired during Super Bowl, which considered to be the most expensive advertisement event, probably for a reason. Audi wanted publicity, they wanted children to have little Audi R8 models on their bed shelves, and in this particular case publicity worked in favor to them.

Many people have money to buy such cars, but only few of them will feel comfortable driving Ferrari, because it does demand certain amount of driving skills to reasonably fully utilize the vehicle. However, Audi created the drivable super car, and above all else also advertised it to the general public, which most of the companies would have never done, because it might have jeopardize their exclusive image. Audi, here, only benefited form it. People who have money, but never considered buying sport vehicle, because of the skill it usually demands, have been reminded of such option again. And what I learned from personal stories and opinion, many people did change their opinion on “sport” cars through Audi R8, and actually bought it. Keep it up Audi!

I was browsing the net, and accidentally found an article about a massive corporation (17.5 billion euros in revenue) called LVMH. This is French based luxury good giant which controls almost half of the whole luxury goods industry in several markets such as clothes and spirits. Companies like Fendi, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Tag Heuer, Moet Chandon, Don Perignon etc are considered to be very exclusive, rare and unique goods,  however they are just a part of a huge corporation which makes almost 5 million in profit, which doesn’t make any sense to me. How come Louis Vuitton purse costs twice as much as Marc Jacobs purse even though Marc Jacobs himself is a head designer for both companies. I understand the whole idea about luxury goods and services, however globalization of it just somehow seems wrong to me. In my mind corporation and a luxury good don’t really go together unless it is something enormous like a jet, yacht, maybach, hotel etc. but how would you feel if lets say Aston Martin, Ferrarri, Bugatti, Maybach, Rolls Royce, Lamborghini were actually under the control of one corporation? This is just wrong. Exclusive things should stay autonomous, independent otherwise it all becomes just like an assembly line product with a different price tag on it. As a personal conclusion for me all of the “exclusive” brands under these corporations  just lost all the value to me. Again its just my personal opinion.

P.S. Look it up girls, and guys .. I guess 🙂 LVMH and PPR

There are many hilarious commercials every now and then, but only small number of them actually work, and vitamin water is one of these lucky brands that made these type of advertisements work positively towards their company image. These short paragraphs on the side of the bottle always make me smile. So how is it that they managed to do that? Well from my point of view the secret – is they didn’t go too far like some of the Trojan condom commercials, and they aren’t awkward too (you laugh at the joke not at the clown). So they positioned themselves really wisely by approaching same customers (soda/pop buyers) with the new product, as well as approaching the new market of “water buyers” with another healthy beverage, which also has taste to it (you can’t actually find anywhere on the bottle that it is part of coca cola, they created the separate brand Glaceau, which also sells smart water). Vitamin Water, in my opinion, has one of the best marketing approach in the whole beverage industry. I think Coca Cola gave its’ marketing department very little restrictions on that project and so far it turned out really well. These hilarious paragraphs on the side, funny commercials with Steve Nash and other celebrities, the lack of web site (their primary web site is a face book page!!), even small things like good looking bottles, give this company a lot of charisma. And brand’s charisma in my opinion, is the deciding factor for companies success in non-alcoholic beverage market.

P.S. It again proved me how valuble marketing can be.

Marketing is HUGE, and the reason is it influences many people in many different ways. However successful marketing is even bigger, because it influences peoples thoughts in one particular way. I’ve recently watched Direct-TV commercial about their new TV plan. Basically it showed the Russian guy, who is terribly rich, can’t speak proper English, and spends most of his time on buying OPULENCE. I laughed about it at first, but then I realized that this commercial sends out the sub-message about Russians in general, which is not pleasant at all. I know a lot of us are educated people who can tell the difference between a joke and the reality. However, you would be surprised how many people I’ve met in Canada and all across the world who judge Russia solely by stereotypes (you know: drive bears to school, drink vodka every day and buy English Premier League soccer clubs on the weekends….yeah that’s what we usually do). My point here is that marketers should be aware that they influence more than just a “target area”. Since Canada is country of many different backgrounds, marketers should be aware that commercials influence people beyond the product that they promoting, they also shape their vision in some cases…

P.S. My Brazilian friend was seriously asked by the girl in UBC if he uses canoe to get to school. 🙂 Food for thought.

While doing my marketing group assignment on AXE shower gel, we researched Old Spice vs. AXE commercial battle which was a big astonishment for me. I never really paid attention to neither Old Spice nor AXE commercials before, but i quickly realized that the biggest part of success for both of them were well designed and made video commercials. By well designed I mean they created an image designed psychologically, socially so that a lot of people would relate to it. By well made I mean the structure of actual video content, is perfectly serves it psychological and social purpose . However, what I wanted to talk about is how advertisement can have an unbelievable impact on product sales. If I were rich back in the day, and someone form AXE came up to me, showed me their business plan, which is to make a shower gel for MEN, 18-24 years old, ohh and yeah, the target area are SHY 18-24 year olds. I would’ve laughed at them. First of all why do you need a shower gel, when you have a shampoo especially when you are 18-24? I’ve never seen someone going into the shower with two different bottles.. Secondly, by creating a “gigolo” shower gel image, people who would purchase it would associate themselves with it. I’m not one of them. Even if I do like the new AXE smell I would never buy it just because of the image they put on it. Old Spice has exactly the same issues to me. Do you really need a constant reminder that you are a man? When did we loose the sense of being a man? or maybe media took it away from a lot of people? I personally just dont understand what was marketers thoughts about an average Old Spice customer. He walks around the house and then suddenly stops and realizes that he forgot that he is a man…he should definitely go and buy some old spice to boost that confidence up. On the serious note, I think there is a bigger issue behind all of this commercial success, the issue that now men (generally speaking) really need a constant reminder that they are men. When Confidence-questioned commercial for man are beating any other ones….thats a serious issue I believe…something is wrong here….

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I love Apple, and one of the reasons why, is that these guys can sell you anything. They’ll make you want even something that you’ll never need, and yes, you will pay a lot of money for it as well. … Ipad really? Seriously, in my opinion it is the most useless thing on the tech market right now, but Apple managed to make the whole technological trend out of it. Ipad is a very limited, It can only do one task at a time etc, and very overpriced device. If you think about it, who really needs it? Someone who is constantly moving (night club manager), because if you have a chance to sit down (student, office clerk etc) you will use laptop which is better in every technological aspect. Everybody have computers these days, and we have smart phones as well, therefore this product is really job specific, like for night club manager, who constantly need a portable screen/database with him/her. However, somehow Apple managed to sell it to EVERYBODY, as well as it created a new industry (trend) in technology market. Companies like Samsung, Google, Windows etc. are creating the similar products, thinking somebody is going to buy them, but REALLY?? WHY??