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In some sense, coffee is a commodity, like rice, corn or wheat – one of the few that doesn’t seem to need as much marketing as other products, at least on the promotional side. Coffee beans are grown en masse in vast agricultural lands, cultivated by an endless flow of cheap third-world labour. While it may be true in some aggregate economic sense that ordinary, mass-produced coffee beans can be seem as a commodity, in other ways, it really isn’t.

If we examine at-home brews more closely, we can see that one of western society’s most beloved drinks is incredibly diverse. There are strong, medium and mild blends, specialty blends, holiday blends, many different brands that promote different lifestyles and images and tastes. There are ground beans, instant coffee and whole beans. Organic or processed, cheap or expensive, premium or store brand – a customer’s options seem endless. Companies such as Folgers, which specializes in at-home brews, along with other companies such as Tim Hortons or Starbucks, which promote their at-home brews alongside their in-store coffees, have diversified this “commodity” into a wide product line scope, creating a diverse range of choice. In the commercial below, Folgers tries to associate its brand with key desirable lifestyle components, such as relationships, family, siblings, and coming home. It cites itself as “the best way to wake up” although in essence, its product is not much different than other instant coffee brands, all originating from that same commodity product.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZnqBL6iYjA

I recently read Lena’s Ji blog post, called Ready or Not, here comes the Christmas Ads! In her post, she uses two examples of Christmas Ads as evidence of common themes that appear in advertisements during the holiday season and then analyzed them accordingly.

Christmas is often called the season of “giving”, but I think for many companies, especially retailers, Christmas is seen more as the season of “buying”, a seasonal spike in demand and the epitome of consumerism and spending. Earlier and earlier in the year, companies are adapting to the Christmas season and not only do they create highly specialized advertisements, as Lena has mentioned in her blog post, but they also invigorate all of their marketing mix with the Christmas spirit.

I recently went to Costco this last weekend and I was captured by how integrated Christmas was in their marketing strategy. Their product mix adapted to the holiday – there were two whole aisles dedicated to Christmas-related products, such as stockings and plastic Christmas trees. Everywhere else inside of the big-box retailer, you could also see the evidence of Christmas in their products. There were chocolates in Christmas packaging, christmas-themed cookies with peppermint and much more.

Costco’s retailing product placement has also changed. They re-arranged the store to create room for Christmas products and a Christmas section. They decorated various aisles with baubles and little mounds of fake snow to create a holiday atmosphere in the store.

While the price of their normal products did not change as a direct effect, they did use special pricing methods for their limited time Christmas products. For example, they would price higher for products in nicer packaging, such as chocolate baskets in pretty ribbon and wrapping even though the cost would not be much more than a normal box of chocolates.

Costco also promotes their Christmas products in-store, through the coupons that customers receive when they walk through the front door. They also held consumers’ interest and spurned their desire for their products by having sampling stations of popular Christmas food items, such as various specialty flavours of hot chocolate, cookies and cakes.

Christmas is a great occasion for not only Costco, but other companies and retailers to capture the holiday’s increased consumer demand.

Science World has recently implemented a new promotional strategy centered around interesting, random and little-known scientific facts. For example, in the pictures above, they state “mosquitos love the colour blue” and “you swallow a litre of snot every day”. In this article, “Vancouver’s Science World has a remarkably…”, you may see more of Science World’s very interesting advertisements.

Much like the creative Coca-Cola outdoor advertisement that we saw in class, Science World also uses a texturized advertisement at a bus stop using pencils with the punchline, “Your body contains enough carbon to fill 9,000 pencils”.

They focus on using outdoor as their main advertising media and utilize specific medium such as billboards, their construction of a litter box, bus stops, and even portable mediums such as balloons.

Science World very effectively utilizes AIDA. They immediately grasp the viewer’s attention with creative and unique advertisements containing very interesting facts that are actually relevant to what they are trying to promote. Not only do they have facts, they also present them in a visually appealing way, using the yellow circles, which catch the viewer’s attention again. Additionally, they also utilize unique advertising media to attract attention, for example the cars and the texturized bus stop ad. Science World creates interest for its products or experiences using the facts and images posted on the ads. For example, the balloon states, “You fart a balloon’s worth of gas a day” and visually stimulating and catchy images such as the “mosquitoes” swarming the blue circle. They create a desire to learn more using their logo and slogan “We can explain”. While they don’t immediately have a call for action, we can see how it would probably be able to draw a greater attendance at Science World through the other 3 factors of AIDA.

In March 2012, Business Strategy Insider wrote about various issues in Ethics in Marketing, such as promoting harmful products to consumers, encouraging consumers to buy products they don’t need, or doing what is in the consumer’s best interest versus catering to what the consumer wants.

I would like to expand on one of the topics raised in their article, specifically promoting harmful products to consumers. As seen above, two product categories whose advertising are now heavily regulated, especially towards children and minors, include junk food and cigarettes.

More than 50 years ago, in the 1960’s, cigarette advertisements that targeted children were prevalent across many advertising channels. However, recognizing the adverse effects of cigarettes on human health and to prevent children and minors from developing a habit for cigarettes, by 1971, advertisements of cigarettes on TV and radio were banned. Today, cigarettes may only be advertised in adult-only establishments which restrict all minors from entry. Not only is selling cigarettes to children and minors unethical, it is also illegal.

If marketing cigarettes to minors is illegal and unethical because it may cause them potential harm, we may then start to draw parallels with another potentially harmful product on the market that is not banned by any means: junk food.

By encouraging children to eat junk foods through marketing, companies are potentially leading these children down a path of lifetime obesity, as researched in this article, Protecting Children from Harmful Food Marketing: Options for Local Government to Make a Difference. Junk food purveyors, such as McDonalds, will often market directly to young children, such as through their products, Happy Meals and toys, and promotion, such as television ads with cartoons and toys, specifically targeted to children’s tv shows. When they do this, marketing ethics are called into question. Is it right to push one of the most vulnerable and easily influenced consumer groups towards foods that harm their bodies and cause them to incorporate these foods into their daily eating habits? Many don’t think so and as a result, throughout elementary, middle and high schools, new initiatives are being pursued to reduce the amount of junk food consumed by children. Advertisements, a form of promotion, featuring junk foods are now banned in schools and school vending machines and cafeterias are making the shift towards healthier and fresher foods – away from packaged and preserved goods – which is both a place limitation for junk food companies.

As time passes and the obesity epidemic becomes more severe, we may see that junk food marketing regulations towards children will slowly come to resemble those of cigarettes – more severe and strictly regulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZVDdB4s7RI

Even though both of these commercials were made for the same company, Toyota, they are vastly different in atmosphere and style. Similarly, they are emphasizing different selling points and are targeting different market segments.

The first one, for the new Prius V, focuses on selling a certain Lifestyle. It pictures a an idyllic, ideal passing of the seasons. It appeals to consumers by bringing up desirable experiences and stimulating content memories and puts the product, the Prius V, in the midst of each scene. For example, the third scene showing the autumn season depicts a happy family going on a trip together, with laughing children and flying kites. Consumers would associate this product with a family lifestyle and therefore be attracted to the product.

This commercial also has cognitive aspects – it provides information regarding the fuel efficiency of the car, similar to the previous Prius, while also promoting its larger interior space. It is also affective as it appeals emotionally to consumers using lifestyle connotations and it plays cheerful and light music in the background to make the viewer happier.

The second commercial has a very different atmosphere than the first. Promoting the new Toyota Camry, the advertisement emphasizes a sleeker feel without delving into lifestyle aspects. It highlights all the new features of the car itself and sets to differentiate its product from others by stating that their car is “built from ideas”. There are no beaches or happy families, but instead shows a single man driving the car. It tries to appeal to a different market segment, perhaps people who still live on their own or who don’t have a family and are looking for a car for its functional and aesthetic features.

The majority of the Camry commercial is built upon a cognitive tactic, citing its fuel efficiency, 30 year long experience with car production and price at the end. Despite this, it also has an affective side, with the colour choices of silver and black, dramatic sound effects and the sun shining on the driver. It again also has a call to action (behavioural) to go out and buy the car.

Even though the two cars are produced by the same company, the two commercials targeted two very different market segments and used different tactics in their commercial development.

In Drew McLellan’s blog, Drew’s Marketing Minute, in which he writes about “The most important job any business owner has” – he claims this is taking care of the business’ brand. He says that “building it [the brand], managing it, protecting it… is the single most challenging job you’ve got”.

While I do not completely disagree with his statement, I would argue that the importance of protecting or building a brand depends on the competitive premise or the products of a company.

For a company where product features, quality and service is of high importance, branding is similarly incredibly important to the company’s ability to thrive. For example, in the cellphone industry, brand is the number one deciding factor in a consumer’s decision – people will even line up hours in advance at an Apple store to buy a new iPhone 5. While there are not that differences in quality or functionality between an iPhone and another smartphone, such as the Samsung Galaxy, people still opt for the more expensive iPhone because of the popularity of the Apple brand.

On the other hand, for companies like Dollarama and Dollar Giant, while they certainly use the power of branding in their marketing strategies, the impact of their brand is not as strong as that of Apple. For example, as a consumer, I would not choose to shop at Dollarama over Dollar Giant because I feel a deeper connection with one brand over another. For large chain dollar stores, protecting their brand is not as important as protecting a brand in the technology industry. They would focus mainly on other parts of marketing, such as which products to offer and at which locations.

In The Economist’s business blog, “Schumpeter”, their article, Yahoo! Searching for a Future, talks about Yahoo!’s declining shares in the social media market, as well as their declining advertisement business. Projections predict that Yahoo! will end up with just over 13% of the market in 2011, while Facebook’s share will leap to more than 16%, up from around 12% in 2010.

Furthermore, as a consumer myself, who avidly uses the Internet and social media outlets, I have a noticeable decline in the prominence of Yahoo! as a search engine or social media outlet, which therefore decreases its overall attractiveness for advertisements. For example, when people wish to look something up, they would predominantly use Google, for which there has even been a official term coined, “googling”, the act of using Google to search for something.

As seen in the chart above, not only is Yahoo! declining as a search engine, but as a social media outlet as well. Even for a business, if they wished to connect with their customers, they would most probably turn towards advertising outlets, such as Facebook or Twitter, which would have a much larger impact on their market than advertising on Yahoo!.

To prevent itself from being bought out by more successful media companies, Yahoo! will have to amp up its innovation to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook and re-capture consumer interest.

As discussed in the recent Comm101 Social Entrepreneurship class, social entrepreneurship encompasses three basic things: a social entrepreneur, a social mission, and a social purpose venture. Social enterprises differ from charities by being sustainable in the long run.

A good example of a strong social enterprise is Right To Play, an international non-profit humanitarian organization. Essentially, Right to Play allows children in poverty in developing countries to develop essential life skills and thereby driving future societal change through playing. They have a wide span of reach, including over 1.15 million children    in 2010 and 18 500 volunteers.

The social entrepreneur behind the enterprise is Johann Koss, a former Olympian, who firmly believed that playing could be used to positively change children’s and their family’s lives. His mission was to ” improve the lives of children in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the world by using the power of sport and play for development, health and peace”. His social purpose venture was to have athletes use their skills to volunteer and help disadvantaged children.

The Right to Play social enterprise is sustainable, because the children that they teach often become leaders in their communities, who in turn become ambassadors of Right to Play and expand the reach of the social enterprise. In fact, one of the enterprise’s guiding principles is sustainability: to have a lasting impact and build the capacity of individuals and their communities to independently deliver learning objectives through play.

Right to Play is a social enterprise, because it teaches skills rather than giving away money like a charity.

According to Priscilla Wito’s blog post, Rotten Apples in China, fake products, and even fake stores, such as the Apple store mentioned in the post, are abound in China. In fact, based on my own experience shopping in China, these fake products are so commonplace that at any point in time while buying a product, it is more likely to be fake than real.

Despite all these fake products, there is also another consumer phenomenon sweeping the nation of China. As the economy is expanding exponentially and the new rich of the country emerge with it, there is an incredibly large growing demand for luxury products that have been commonplace in Western countries for a very long time, such as clothing brands, electronics, and etc.

 Due to the extraordinary demand for these products, luxury brands, such as Prada or Gucci, can usually markup their products by 200-400% in the Chinese market, although a portion of that is used towards transportation and paying custom duties. Regardless, luxury brand’s profit margins are considerably higher in China than say, in Canada. For example, an average Coach bag in Vancouver is about $200 CAD but can sell for about $4000 RMB in China or roughly $715 CAD.

In Amanda Ho’s post, White Ice, she talks about the sustainability benefit of Coca-Cola’s recent new social venture, wherein they donated to the World Wildlife Fund, promoting awareness about climate change and its consequences on polar bears.

To capitulate on this venture, Coca-Cola has also introduced a new polar-bear themed white can to advertise and promote their Corporate Social Responsibility and their commitment to environmental sustainability, which is a growing trend in the market.

However, not only is this a great example of sustainability and CSR, Coca-Cola’s new can and strategy are the ultimate marketing ploys. Coca-Cola has truly milked their new venture through and through. Despite the fact that their company has in fact nothing to do with polar bears or the Arctic, and nor are polar bears particularly gentle or cute to begin with, they have managed to use images of cute and generally placable polar bears as a marketing way to gain consumers. They have also started an “Arctic Home” on their website, which also drives home their new polar bear strategy to their consumers.