Tag: Trends

Smile!

Post author By andreu
Post date March 13, 2011
2 Comments on Smile!

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).

Tags Photography, Target markets, Trends

Clothing Technology

“Retro” is the new “New”

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:

Tags Photography, Trends

Clothing

Stylish=Zara=Cheap?

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.

Tags Europe, Trends

Food

Taco “Campana”

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:

Tags Advertisement, Target markets, Trends

Clothing Technology

Google.

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.

Tags Internet, Trends

Services

Not long ago in a city not far, far away… a firm was born to rule over its industry

Post author By andreu
Post date February 2, 2011
No Comments on Not long ago in a city not far, far away… a firm was born to rule over its industry

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.

Tags Coffee, Trends