Connor's Blog

I had been searching my classmates’ blogs for the topic of ‘marketing yourself’ when I came across Quinn Blunderfield’s post “Cover Letters: Self Marketing 101“. I think he pretty much hit the nail on the head when talking about the cover letter:

It is the epitome of self-marketing, and while different industries look for different presentation forms, an            underlying ‘mix of confidence and candidness’ is extremely important in achieving employment.

A great cover letter is something we, as aspiring professionals, wish desperately could be taught and we hope a course in ‘Career Fundamentals’ will do the trick. But when you look at the cover letters that have gone viral, it is surely a lesson in marketing that will get you an interview.

People sometimes confuse the cover letter or resume as the product that they are working on, when really it is the promotion of ourselves as products. And so when we try to copy a cool cover letter we find online, we’re taking the promotion of a different product and trying to fit it to us. Picture this as Mattel using a beer commercial to sell Barbies and just replacing the bottles with dolls.

You’re selling the qualities you have that are worthwhile to the employer, namely what makes you unique. Buzzfeed.com provides another set of great examples when it comes to resumes: 21 Masterfully Creative Resumes. These people are able to stand out from a crowd because they didn’t follow a tutorial on crafting the perfect resume. They made it very clear what their hireable qualities were through promotion unique to their product.

To sum it all up, sadly, there is no quick fix for landing your dream job. But I don’t want to end this post on a downer so here’s a puppy!

As I study for my upcoming exams (a.k.a. peruse social media), I can’t help but think of how pervasive marketing is in our lives. I came across a post on social media blog buzzfeed.com called “23 Insane Things You Should Know About Snack Foods” and realized while I was reading that it was all about the four P’s of marketing and how ginormous an impact they have on both the consumer and the business.

Businesses are willing to go to extreme lengths to gain new customers, especially when their product life cycle is in maturity or declining. Snack foods are long past the introductory stage and have mostly stopped growing so companies like Frito Lay are spending millions to perfect product, price, place and promotion.

Coca-Cola conducted a survey to find out the impact of a consumer’s movements through grocery stores. They want their products displayed at the entrance and then findable near the end of a person’s shopping experience. They found that typically consumers travel counterclockwise through a supermarket and so position themselves accordingly.

These snack food marketing team also finances a vast array of product research and development. Not only do they want you to consume their product, they also want you to keep crawling back for more. They look for ways to make the food more addictive (salt is great for this) or in Coke’s case, forgettable, so that the consumer doesn’t get bored with the strong flavour.

And of course sugar and fat are in heavy supply. They are as addictive as they are delicious… I should go make a salad.

Again this could lead back to a discussion on ethical marketing, especially since many of these addictive ingredients are far past our daily recommended intake, but what I see is opportunity. A stagnant industry doesn’t mean stagnant marketing, it means the opposite.

A recent article on Huffington Post Canada has me a little perplexed. The article states that my generation, the Millennials, are the only generation to find their smartphones more important than their cars. Initially, this seems like some new and interesting information from a study done by rental car company ZipCar.

Yet it seems ultimately flawed. The survey simply asked which would have a larger negative impact on your life, losing your car or our smartphone. To answer this question, a person chooses one over the other but their reasons vary depending on personal experiences. A person may feel differently towards the specific type of smartphone or car that they have and react accordingly to the loss. A cheap smartphone with little function or an old jalopy could cause drastically different answers than an iPhone or a tech-heavy BMW.

And what other common characteristics about Millennials can skew this data? Many are focusing on post-secondary education, living relatively close to their place of study or participating in a student bus fare plan. As well, they are still dependent on their parents who can support their travels. This would cause a spike in older generations’ dependence of cars rather than that of Millennials.

This study would also be biased by complementary goods, as cars coincide with insurance payments and ever-rising gas prices. Cars are seen as money pits while smartphones offer a vast array of seemingly free features. So when a millennial is asked which loss would have a larger negative impact on their life, their negative feelings toward cars would factor in. This emotional response doesn’t necessarily correlate with the necessity of a vehicle in a person’s life.

So I pose this question; does this survey matter to car or smartphone companies? It makes a big statement but can we trust it?

Another Superbowl Sunday has come and gone…

And as always, the commercial time between plays has garnered big bucks from top American companies looking to showcase their products on a world stage (the biggest televised world stage there is) and its a phenomenon that viewers at home have started to really enjoy. It has become a competition of sorts to see who will end up on the “Best of..” lists, a good tell that your commercial has had a lasting impact.

So how do companies stand out? Some have chosen to encroach on the game itself with ads popping up on the screen during a replay or in the actual stadium. Some now even release Superbowl commercials a week or two in advance to try and be remembered. But the thread tying this all together is quite simply MONEY. These commercials are EX. PEN. SIVE.

So why write about this? With all the money flying around trying to catch my eye, oddly enough, what had the biggest impact on me as a consumer was something that cost basically nothing.

After Beyonce crushed the halftime show (another post may be in order for that), the stadium fell dark during a half hour power outage. While this happened, Oreo cookies tweeted “Power Out? No Problem” with the following photo:

The ad agency 360i and Oreo had a mission control set up during the game and were able to quickly pass the idea through the proper channels for approval. For all the money spent by other companies, this was by far the best promotional idea. It was unique, current and quite funny.

The tweet had thousands of likes and retweets within minutes. It created an online buzz like none of the real commercials were able to do.

A couple years ago I read a novel called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. It picked apart the culture of food (for the most part focusing on meat) and explored the vastly under-scrutinized way in which companies are feeding it to us. And by that I don’t just mean their product, but their marketing ploys and schemes.

See I’m still an active carnivore so the meat on my table doesn’t bother me. But when I sit down with fork in hand, there is a moments hesitation where I wonder how it got there. But I remind myself of all the labels on the packaging. These chicken were free-range! And I can stop worrying about my health because my bread is multi-grain and pretty much everything else was organic!

With books like Foer’s and new op-ed pieces/studies/blogs/tweets churned out daily about green eating, consumers are starting to see value in healthy and sustainable food options. From this turn towards conscientious consumerism, comes value for the food companies, but only by a label. That’s all they need! ‘Organic’ has a wide variety of definitions so your food may still not be 100% organic. And multigrain only means that your bread has multiple grains so has basically no meaning.

So here’s the ethical dilemma: Should companies be accountable for their labelling or is it just good marketing? The way I see it is that companies selling meat or animal bi-products have very little brand loyalty. Can you remember the brand of meat product you last bought? Probably not. So ethical business practices are not even necessary, much less a priority. Companies will spend money on finding a label loophole before they’ll make an operational change.

Is ‘value’ only a matter of perception? Is it unethical if we’re none the wiser? Basically I’m asking if a tree falls…

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