Christine Zhang's Blog

After perusing through a couple of blogs, I came upon Rohit Bhargava’s blog titled Influential Marketing Blog, and was particularly drawn to a post titled “The Upside of being Ordinary and Obvious”.

The author of the post summarizes that sometimes, the most obvious and ordinary marketing strategy is the best and I definitely agree with him. In this age, where promotion is one of the largest factors in making a company and its product successful or not, Companies often forget that the product’s most obvious and ordinary aspect may be its greatest competitive advantage.

The author lists three reasons why the obvious strategy may be the best:
1) Customers have ordinary and obvious requirements
2) The ordinary and obvious are the most important
3) The ordinary and the obvious may have its passionate fans

I believe most goods need a marketing strategy and advertisement that create a distinct positioning in the consumer’s minds. Due to the growth of technology and the creation of the internet, many companies tend to be competitive in their creative and innovative advertisements; therefore, losing sight of why the product is actually valued by consumers. At the same time, these “crazy” advertisements make it hard for consumers to interpret the products main benefits.

Expanding on the Blackberry example, used in the blog, the company seems to have forgotten the crux as to why their phones are so popular and instead focuses on its products new features that other smart phones already possess. Loyal Blackberry users are born because they find the simple and easy keyboards more convenient than other smart phones; however, there are never any advertisements that show this. Blackberry needs to stop comparing its product to the fast improvement of their competitors products and instead, focus on re-capturing the uniqueness of their own market following.

Sometimes, simple positioning and promotion can be the most effective in selling a product!

After reading Matthew Marshall’s Blog , I thought about value pricing vs. cost based pricing and what I personally look for as a consumer. Value pricing is when a company creates a product that they believe can sell at a certain price depending on its perceived value. Cost based pricing is when a company sets the price of the product to be higher than the cost of production, plus a certain profit margin. So which pricing strategy targets me, as a consumer, more successfully?

Where I waste money: the fashion industry.

Fashion finance gurus estimate Chanel’s annual revenue to run between $2.3 billion and $3 billion and estimate the value of Chanel’s fashion business to be between $5.6 billion and $7.7 billion. The estimated cost of the Chanel bag above is $4,450 canadian. This classic chanel bag is sold all over the world, is there best selling bag and seems to attract a never-ending demand from consumers. Chanel definitely uses value pricing when deciding the price on these bags because the costs of production, distribution etc. do not add up to its retail price. Since Chanel’s financials are private, I looked up another luxury brand in order to see if Chanel really used value pricing as their pricing strategy. Hermes is worth 17 times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Chanel is successful at selling its brand; therefore, the perceived value of this bag, from the consumers point of view, allows the fashion house to charge such an exponentially high price.

It’s obvious that Chanel’s value pricing strategy works; however, there are always customers who are unable to afford an actual Chanel bag or customers who do not see the value of buying a real Chanel bag at the cost of approx. $5,000. Knock-off bags of many brands appear all over the world and are estimated to retail at around $200. In the case of certain consumers, the value pricing strategy for Chanel will not work at all. Knock-off bags are a more accurate representation of cost-based pricing, especially the really cheap ones you can haggle for in Asia.

After browsing through a couple of my classmate’s blogs, I stumbled upon Rose Koo’s  blog post titled “Marketing Wars”. I learned that Facebook had hired a private PR agency to spread false stories about Google in order to harm the company’s image, harm the opening of Google+ as well as market its own company’s image. She mentioned that this method was “unethical” and that if the story was a lie, the truth would eventually appear.

This got me thinking on my take on marketing ethics.

In terms of the marketing attack by Facebook on Google+, I think that what Facebook did was unethical, but it was smart. The only problem that they faced was that Facebook could have made it so that they would not have been found out (if that’s possible). I really believe that the world of business is not supposed to be based on ethics or the truth, but about whichever company is smart enough to create a truth and market it to their consumers.

In her blog, Rose gave a number of examples about products that were marketed ethically, even though there were commercials which showed the company’s product as better than their competitors (ex. tide vs. leading competitor). I wanted to focus on something that was marketed that didn’t necessarily have to be a product.

This brought me to think about the one comparative commercial that I’ve always believed to be not only unethical, but counter-productive in what the marketing group wants to achieve. Instead of gathering support, I felt as if the marketing team was taking away supports.

This is just one of the many attack adds that appear around the time of voting! Ironically, I think all these adds just make the individual’s adds weaker!

I thought that this video response was very intelligent! The Green Party is essentially creating another attack add, but they do it in a manner that is witty and reaches out to the people.

I’m not going to lie… After years of schooling, I abhor the acts of collecting data, understanding data and even the word data itself. After our last class, although still disliking data, I have come to form a slight appreciation for data and the various facets of it. I never knew that there were actually two types of data:

Primary Data is data that has been created by yourself, or your company and is carried out through paper survey’s, online survey’s, social media etc. Through the data, companies come up with results that help them analyze customer behaviour and come up with a research plan.

Secondary Data is data that has been created by others and will then often be compiled into large databases, such as Statistics Canada (www.statcan.gc.ca). As a student, I would much rather pay some small fees to a large database and gather as much secondary data as fast as I could than have to take the time, effort and money to gather my own primary data. However, I looked through the Marketing Recommended Reading List and found this interesting web site :

http://www.trendwatching.com/.

This website has hundreds of people in over 120 countries look out for potential new trends, compiles the information seen, and then presents and sells them to CEO’s and large corporations and any business man who wants to launch a new idea/trend. This website collects primary data and then sells it through their website as secondary data, and yet, this website’s data is not substantial or guaranteed because trends are something that are predicted and depends on biased views. Most people want to buy secondary data that is 100% accurate and unbiased, but this data is not either and still probably sells amazingly! I thought this website was brilliant, and thoroughly enjoyed going through it.

Hi everyone,

My name is Christine Zhang, and I’m a second year Sauder student. I’m taking this course because it’s apart of my Standard Time Table, but after careful consideration, I think i’ll be interested to see what I learn from this course.

Obviously I’ve experienced marketing as a consumer in the form of television ads, ads mailed to my house, ads in newspapers etc. When I was working at my summer internship at UBS SDIC, I was asked to create a fund and then figure out a way to market it to respective clients. This form was marketing was different what I experienced on a day to day basis and gave me something to think about. I hope we study more about the corporate side of marketing.

I love ads for large fashion houses such as Chanel, YSL etc. I think they’re gorgeous, and extremely thought out, careful etc. I think all the clothes and the concept of the ad design are all thought of perfectly for the clientele they are trying to reach out too.

On a personal note, I love shopping for gifts and christmas is my favourite time of the year.