Month: October 2013

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With the rapid growth of smart phones users, companies slowly gives up the traditional method to reach out to customers – advertisements, and instead use mobile apps to capture as much attention from customers as they possibly can. Social media takes the most responsibility for such changing trend. It also became a bridge for companies to access its customers. With such benefits, the competition between fashion clothing companies increased enormously. Customers have almost perfectly transparent access to companies’ data, including costs, prices, and more, they can easily jump from a company to another for lower prices. Thus price war is no longer an option for companies to attract and keep its customers.

People have unlimited wants and often value wants more than needs. Clothing is a typical example. Teenagers nowadays constantly changing their clothes and buy new ones to keep up with the fashion trend. In result companies like ASOS display thousands and thousands of clothing options in their mobile app.

Before you even access to the clothing, the app does a series of categorization for genders, styles, and types of clothes. Customers even need to join or sign in to allow ASOS to collect their shopping habits and preferences to decide on what kind of products to display or recommend.

These filtering features allow us to look at the clothes we wish to purchase instead of browsing through other things we do not want to buy. Along with other user-friendly features, ASOS successfully capture not only the local teenagers in UK but also the globe. Without such marketing method, ASOS would have not increase its sales and possibly fail to stand in the industry.

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In New York and Los Angeles, two cultural epicentres of the United States, billboards with cryptic messages regarding regulating the internet were erected anonymously. In the first week of October, several billboards in each city featured a plain grey background with unsettling quotes in solid black writing stating th

After the billboards had been posteings like, “Artists need to play by the rules” and “Your data should belong to the NSA”. The billboards were both shocking and confusing, because they relayed a sentiment that has very recently become a controversial topic for discussion in the U.S.for a week, in the middle of the night when no one would notice, they were changed to reflect the exact opposite of what they said before. For example, the billboard that said, “Your data should belong to the NSA” was changed so that it read “Your data should belong to YOU”. Such altercation to the billboards is a simplification of the trend that the internet has adopted over its own lifespan.

While the rate of improvement in technology has been rapidly increasing in the past decades, the consumer of the internet has been looking for ways to hold onto their savings due to the instability of the economy. Bit Torrent’s first set of billboards reflect the intuition employed when the internet first launched, but the second set mirrors the convenient ways for us consumers to transfer files online with ease. The controversy created by this marketing strategy is understandable, but ultimately the company is successful in this campaign because it strikes to the daily goals of the average day consumers: To save money where ever possible without giving up the very things that keeps us sane.