I want it

I was reading in Kaylee’s blog about something I have been experience myself and I think makes a great last post. She and I have experienced an increased awareness about what surrounds us. We are now able to look at everything with another perspective, our eyes see now more details everywhere because we know have the knowledge of the other side. We have seen through the marketing people’s eyes. That’s the most important lesson I took about this course. I will find myself looking up the details on how to do a SWOT, long forgotten, but this teaching will always influence me.

A discovery I made recently were Google advertisements in their e-mail provider Gmail. As if I had a blindfold before, I noticed a link to this page. I had probably been absorbing ads on a daily basis without realizing and now they tell me they’ll do a better job with it. Now those ads are supposed to fit my tastes.

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As you have seen I have a well known passion for photography and that has led me to pursue the use of techniques of postprocessing quite frequently. One I found particularly interesting is the Tilt-Shift technique. Originally achieved optically through lenses that had the possiblility to rotate on the vertical axis, it is now easy to emulate on the most basic of postprocessing software¹. The effect resulting in making everything on the picture look miniature.

All I have just mentioned came all back to me while looking at Andrea Wong’s last blog post where she mentioned the technique was used in Disneyland’s advertising. So I did some research and found out, on a post in AdFreak blog, that this has been a quite popular trend in advertisement. Of course the original procedure applies only to still pictures as used quite wisely by car manufacturers (Mazda and Land Rover) and toy stores (Toys’R’Us):

The miniature effect makes everything look like a toy Continue reading »

This week I will follow on the subject I talked about in my last post: cameras. Since its invention and access to the main public, cameras have evolved in many ways and directions. Once the technological advances allowed it, products focused in different market sectors started to appear. I got  the idea for this post in this video of Malcom Gladwell I saw a year ago on the great site TED.com (I really recommend it, and this one particular lecture is an example of how in marketing it is easy to explain concepts in a different but effective way).

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I recently browsed through some old pictures my grandma has stored in a shoe box. Everyone kept telling me how much I look like my father in his 20’s, but I couldn’t help but notice the similarities were not only in the obvious consequences of parenthood but also in the clothes and accessories.

I recently bought an Olympus E-PL1 camera, my very first one (at least the first one I chose and payed for entirely), and many factors came into the decision of buying this particular model and brand. I know you must be thinking what does this have to do with the previous paragraph, but please bear with me until the end. First of all, I had good previous experience with the brand, both my father and uncle have Oly DSLR’s and my sister has a compact. They are reliable, have good lenses (we are talking about real photography so forget about megapixels) and give the best for the buck. The competition paled in comparison: Sony (NEX Series) doesn’t know the first thing about lenses and Panasonic (DMC-G Series) built a similar camera with lenses fully compatible. Nikon and Canon didn’t even bother with this sub-market. So look at them both:

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Globalisation has reached a point where all the most important cities in the world are starting to look suprisingly alike. Of course you can’t copy the Tour Eiffel, oh wait! The japanese did just to prove that a taller one could be built (it’s just 8’6 meters, but it IS higher). Jokes apart, you can’t really copy the Tour Eiffel AND Notre-Dame AND the Seine. The commercial neighbourhoods, however, are really converging to clones of each other. Barcelona used to have the biggest widest variety of small stores downtown, but with increasing price competence and soaring rent rates nowadays you can only find big firms such as H&M or Zara.

Most of those stores belong to the Inditex Group. According to the website those stores are: “Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home and Uterqüe; boasting 4.907 stores in 77 countries.” I don’t have enough space nor interest and knowledge to analise the whole firm, but I wanted to introduce the environment of the flagship chain store: Zara. Continue reading »

The last time I visited the USA I was an impressionable 17-year-old teenager (I’m 24 now, exchange student peculiarities you can say) that fell in love with one of the many fast food chains in the country: Taco Bell. It was cheap, it had mexican food (which I love despite being the opposite of my mediterranean diet) and it tasted great. But it wasn’t until this reading week, when I went to California, that I could finally visit again my beloved restaurant.

It is kind of surprising I could perfectly manage through the state with only my spanish, and Taco Bell was no exception. Employees spoke spanish fluently (granted his accent is way different than mine) and gave a friendly smile whenever they realized we shared languages. There I started to realize the targeted market was quite well defined. So a quick search on the net confirmed it on a video campaign:

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This time there’s no fancy title. This firm has such a strong brand name that it makes the best headline possible. But we are here to talk about marketing strategies, what has Google to do with it? It’s all about inovation. They started with just a search engine with the simplest of outlines, backed up by a powerful searching and indexing algorithm. And with every new project, they have followed those guidelines. Take for example Gmail, it works perfectly, the design is superb yet very basic and has a source code that is a peace of art.

Of course some of their original ideas¹ didn’t really stick, and others modelled after hyped products² from the competitors failed as well, but by trying to cover everything, you are allowed to crash from time to time. They didn’t when approaching advertisement. Continue reading »

Today was busy. Classes, meetings with teammates, cooking dinner,… and then now. I was just browsing through dozens of classmate’s posts to get some inspiration and then it hit me. It was a firm commented on class, it was the focus of our team assignment and I had just read some piece of information about it on a blog. It’s Starbucks.

I can’t even summarize why this company is such a great subject for marketing in this short entry so I’ll narrow it down to a topic you wouldn’t readily associate it with: Technology. The starting point was the article about phone payments but as I searched deeper into the firm’s blog I found this other topic. Continue reading »

When I heard this phrase coming out of Ari Gold’s mouth in hit TV Show Entourage I couldn’t help but think about online betting firms and how it would make a really great subject for a post. Being one of the most controversial industry nowadays is by itself a good enough reason.

As seen in the picture, bwin.com has language localization

In my previous post I mentioned F.C. Barcelona refused to sign many sponsors in the latest years, one of the most interesting coming from betting tycoon Bet and Win¹. In the end they couldn’t convince them to put their name on the jersey, but they got a pretty nice deal as the “official betting webpage” of the club. That in the end meant I was sent a 6 euro coupon to play for free. Everyone loves this kind of coupons, there’s nothing to be lost, and you get to feel the rush of winning money without risk. On a surprisingly lucky streak I managed to get 20 euros out of the coupon, and then lost everything. And I also lost the money on my sister’s coupon. Continue reading »

I was born Barcelona, a city bathed by the Mediterranean and thus at the heart of European commerce and trends. Apart from cooking with olive oil one trend we all strongly follow comes from up north though, and that is soccer (we call it football). Our team, F.C. Barcelona, arguably one of the best teams in history, has a unique ideosincracy, treating its supporters with utmost respect (we are serious people, cheering in the stadium is surprisingly polite) and consulting them on most of the important decisions. In short, there are presidential elections once every 4 years and a randomly selected group of paying supporters get to say their opinion¹.

I mention all this because they all recently accepted a business proposal from the newly elected president, Sandro Rossell: the team would be earning money from a jersey sponsor, Qatar Foundation. I won’t discuss the terms of the deal, it was so huge that it even got featured at the cover of Financial Times. Continue reading »