Month: October 2010

Do countries “position” themselves? Well they’re countries after all, so of course they have to take a stance in many global issues, but do they position themselves in the marketplace?

They certainly do. Take German sport/luxury automobiles: BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi; for years these brands have all been grouped together as “German cars”. “German” in this sense conveyed a certain quality of cars not found anywhere else. In fact, anything that’s made in Germany has a positive connotation to it (I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “it must be good, it’s made in Germany”). Canada, too, has been used as a branding mechanism. Walking down grocery-store aisles it’s not uncommon to see “Real Canadian Maple Syrup”, or (as mentioned in class) “Alberta Beef”. When I was in Québec City over the summer, I saw firsthand that there was a huge emphasis on “made in Canada”; any good that was locally manufactured had a little Canadian flag attached somewhere, and many locals wouldn’t buy products that didn’t.

I got the idea for this post from Steven Brewer. In Steven’s last post, he was talking about, among other things, Latvian women. He grouped all the women of Latvia together, and gave them a positive association with the country, much like cars with Germany.

Excellence in engineering is something Germans are widely known for, and I think that if a country has a perceived quality like this associated with it, it can be a great advantage. Firms from within the country can use these perceptions, and the attitudes they create to position themselves in the market place and positively differentiate themselves in key ways.

Last weekend I flew home for Thanksgiving to see my folks, and while there I caught a Rider game with my dad.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, they are the CFL football team that sports a green jersey.  I remember hearing that next to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Saskatchewan Roughriders sell the most memorabilia of any sports team in Canada.  That said, 99.9% of the fans come to the game wearing team jerseys (as well as face paint and carved watermelon helmets), so when sitting in the grandstands, all I could see around me was green: the field, the players, and even the fans.

Fans have a bit more to look at than just the action on the field.  From a marketing perspective, sporting events are fantastic opportunities for companies to show all the crazed enthusiasts that they support their passion.  From the side lines to the end zones, and even imprinted on the turf; ads are everywhere on game day.  When you notice an ad there’s usually a slogan, logo, or brand name to identify the company or product, but before you give any attention to the ad itself you have to actually see it.  The predominant medium of advertising in stadiums is large rectangular posters/banners.   Throughout the game I began to realize that there were several ads I kept noticing over and over again.  I became curious, and started to consider what it was about the particular ads that made them so eye-catching.   The three most prominent ads I saw were from Nissan, Rona and Coca Cola.  I ruled out that it had anything to do with brand recognition or loyalty as I love Nissan (owned two, still own one), but I have never so much as been inside a Rona (grew up with Home Depot), and I have long since stopped drinking pop (and even when I did I wasn’t much for Coke [or Pepsi]).  So with that possible conclusion out, I scanned around the field and compared the three ads with all the others.  It didn’t take me long after that to realize that it was the colouring scheme of the ads that made all the difference.  Considering the environment was a sea of green, I found it surprising how many green-coloured ads there were as they were completely blurred into their surroundings.  Anything coloured predominantly green, or in something like yellow that complimented green, blended in so well with everything that they were nearly invisible; that is, unless you were specifically looking for them.

Everyone in Comm 296 is also taking Comm 290, so I’m sure we all remember Brian going on about why we use the colours we do when formatting our excel documents.  Red, yellow, blue and pumpkin.  Those colours, with the exception of yellow (and that was only due to the overwhelmingly green environment), were the colours present in the ads that I found most noticeable.  After noticing this, I started critiquing the ads, and trying to decide what could have made them even more apparent.  The Nissan ad was a white background with “NISSAN” written in red; I thought bolder thicker lettering and some use of black in the border would have done wonders.  The Rona ad had a blue background with “RONA” so bold and large that the borders of the poster were indistinguishable from edges of the letters; to improve this I would’ve just shrunk the lettering considerably so that more of the blue background was visible.  The most visible by far was the Coca Cola ad, and what I saw done so well in this ad was mainly what I applied when “fixing” the other ads.  The ad was for Coke Zero, and it had a completely black background, with “Coca Cola” written medium-sized in it’s classic swirly font with red colouring, and finally a lower-case “zero” in bold-ish white lettering.   What I found so effective was the considerable use of the black background to really emphasize the already easy-to-see red, and the contrast with the white letters for the “zero”.  The medium sized font was also very readable as it didn’t take up the whole poster like “RONA” did in the Rona ad.  There was also a pumpkin coloured ad that I readily noticed while at the game, but it wasn’t a company I was familiar with, so I forgot it… They have their ad scheme down, but I guess they need a little work on getting into my “known brands” haha.

Well, that was my marketing insight for this week.  Maybe it was even insightful enough to make up for my lack of insight the week before?? 😉 Maybe I’ll just try and be insightful on a weekly basis from here on out.

In my last blog I mentioned my arrant desire to purchase two particular products: a pair of Vibram five fingers shoes, and an Apple iphone 4.  Well it’s been another fruitless week.  Why might it be that I can’t acquire either of these very well known products, or is that just it, the fact that they’re so popular?  It certainly wouldn’t seem that these companies would have such poor transportation practices that they couldn’t deliver a reasonable amount of their product to consumers.  The answer: it’s a bit of both.  Apple sold nearly 1.7 million iphone 4s during the first weekend they were on the market, and to date – a little over a month later –  more than 3 million iphone 4s are in users hands.  So why was it that Future Shop on Granville only got 2 in last week? While demand peaked on the debut weekend, the relentless line of impatient would-be iphone 4 consumers continues to grow faster than Apple’s strained factories can produce.  Why is this product so popular that it is consistently gone from the shelves faster than it can be replaced?  The story was the same with Vibram.  Vancouver was my last stop on my family’s end-of-the-summer road trip, and I hit every stop I could on the way up from San Fransisco, Cali without luck.  It was the same everywhere I went, “we’re all out” “you’re the eleventh person who’s been in looking for them  today” “talk nice to Santa Claus”… Getting to the point, what makes five fingers and the iphone different, ie what is it that sets them apart from the competition?  First of all, they – Apple anyway –  have such a loyal costumer base that they were able to sell 1.7 m units on the first weekend.  The fact that so many were bought before the product could even be used and proven by society to be a worthwhile product proves that there was so much trust placed in this company, in this brand, by its consumers.  Both companies knew they had good products; Apple obviously anticipated selling at least 1.7 m iphone 4s, but neither company expected demand to sustain for so long , and therefore didn’t think there was need to increase production to accommodate it.  So now I’ve discussed that these items are so hard to get due to their popularity, but what is it that makes them so popular?

The individual fingered/toed and bare foot running design of the five fingers shoes is completely revolutionary in the personal footwear industry, just like the iphone 3G was in the personal telecommunications industry when it first appeared, and people love it!  Apple and Vibram have seen around the curvature of the market trends in their industries and capitalized on it by bringing something completely new and desirable to the table while competitors keep producing the same old staples.  Of course over time competition will key into their rivals’ success and produce similar products, such as cell phone producers like Google, Samsung and HTC have already done to try to compete with the iphone.  Until then, however, as in Vibram’s case, the company will still remain the sole provider of barefoot-running type shoes, and I will still continue to compete against the rest of society for a pair.