If there is a company that means marketing that company would have to be Coca-Cola. I guess if you have developed the worlds most recognizable brand you understand a thing or two about marketing but Alexandra Marynczak’s blog, “Coke Gets Personal,” does a good job of directing us towards a campaign that demonstrates Coke’s true marketing genius. The campaign is virtually a master course in branding. If the point of most branding exercises is to get your customer to connect to your product and to develop loyalty towards it, then could there possibly be a better way to do that than to let put their own name on it? How about the name of the person they love most? Since, really, there is not a whole lot that separates a Coke from an ocean of fizzy caffeinated sugar waters, it is really the label that sells the product. Actually, this is perhaps the reason why as stated earlier Coke is marketing and letting people create their own personal brands for your product sells. So, as Alexandra points out why would Coke stop there? They not only put names on bottles, but also on Coke’s billboards and they ran contests for people to vote for which names people wanted to see most. In short, they engaged their customers and ran perhaps the most personal campaign of all time by letting people choose the names of their loved ones to “share a coke” with. The numbers that coke reports from this campaign are impressive and it is not surprising when you consider that they are tapping into each individuals deepest emotional connections and using them to connect them to a bottle or a can of Coca-Cola.

Video is a powerful medium. That is when used in the right hands, anyway. In the wrong hands it is painfully tedious. Therefore, for a professor to assign a video presentation to intro marketing students could justifiably be considered masochism by most outsiders. Whether this is the case for 296 with Tamar well, that I am not in a fair position to judge. I am better equipped to judge that the video produced by my group this term does fall short of abject self-flagellation. In fact, I believe that despite the ruthless outpouring of information about Apple and it’s marketing plans for China we managed to also provide a modicum of entertainment. Perhaps I am just biased by the process of making it. I actually enjoyed how our team pulled together and shot a video one fine sunny afternoon.
I think that this term we actually worked pretty well as a team, in fact. There were certainly varying skill-sets and we had our share of adversity with illnesses, vacations, family commitments, unaccommodating schedules and stress. It were these issues that upon reflection really give me a sense of appreciation for each of my fellow team members, though. When called upon each of us stepped up and there were definitely times when more was asked or less was required for each of us. In the end if we did not do as well on an assignment as we would have liked, we re-evaluated and took corrective action so that we could succeed going forward. I knew that each of us cared and would contribute when called upon to try do better going forward and frankly, I am proud of what we did.

Enjoy

In the previous article, we examined some of the benefits of social media marketing. With all of the advantages, why would anyone not get on board? Well there are definitely some draw backs to this type of marketing.

With any type of marketing done online using a free platform, the business runs the risk of quickly releasing content without fully controlling what it is putting out there. For example, if a small business owner who doesn’t have much time to run their business let alone tweet, facebook, instagram, and pinterest, is in charge of everything, they might just put a post out there with spelling mistakes or upload an unwanted photo and once it is out in cyberspace and people see it, even if it is taken down that is still all people will talk about. Another issue for larger companies is that if you choose to outsource your social media or pass it down to an intern and that employee is terminated, you need to have a plan in place to ensure that said employee does not still have access to all of the accounts. Otherwise, they could be able to take out their frustrations over being let go on the company. Take HMV’s recent disaster where “An angry employee, one of several hundred let go by the company that day during a round of mass layoffs, decided to vent her frustrations – on HMV’s official Twitter account.” Needless to say, when something interesting hits the twittersphere, it spreads like wildfire and there is nothing a company big or small can do to stop it. A very dangerous aspect to social media marketing is the fact that a company can easily be taken down by one small comment that is taken the wrong way which forces companies to be on top of their game since the risks of offending or upsetting customers are so high. Another similar issue happened with Applebee’s restaurant chain in the US when, in the opinion of her fellow employees, a waitress was wrongfully terminated by management and took to the world of social media to garner attention on the matter. The issue quickly spiralled out of control with Applebee’s management handling everything so poorly that the issue actually went viral. Months later companies are now using this story as a social media “what not to do”.

In our digital age, social media marketing is a phenomenon that is only gaining momentum. There’s everything from full blown twitter and Facebook ad campaigns with celebrity endorsements designed to increase viewership and “followers” for large corporations such as Coca-Cola or 7 For All Mankind Jeans to your local wine shop just down the street. With all of the benefits of social media marketing, it is no wonder that it has caught on so quickly. Some of the benefits of using social media include the ability to communicate directly with customers, gaining their feedback to improve products; launching contests to spread the word about a new product; gaining VIP access to events such as klout scores; and leveraging celebrity endorsements via photos on instagram, a quick tweet, or even video uploads.

The 7 For All Mankind’s Facebook campaign even went so far as hiring James Franco to direct a series of videos to be released gradually allowing people to vote on the ending. They had a grand prize at the end in anticipation of the release of their newest style of jeans garnering over 300,000 followers on Facebook alone… who knew jeans could be so exciting? Most of all, social media marketing can be incredibly cheap, involving mostly just the cost of endorsements, video or photo shoot content.

Unlike print media and television, social media marketing is inclusive to all types of businesses from big to small. In part two, we will take a closer look at some of the downfalls of social media marketing and examine some real cases of where social media went extremely wrong.

In an interesting twist on social marketing, a new firm has begun using twitter to deliver advertising campaigns to clients in only 24 hrs. The World’s Fastest Agency, , has recognized that within the context of this “lightening fast 24/7 global media and social culture” some companies need to get their message out fast, or perhaps first. So, what WFA has done is set up a business where clients can streamline their advertising programs, distilling them down to a brief they deliver over twitter, along with $999. Then the client waits a measly 24 hours for the NYC based firm to “leverage  [their] network of freelance advertising creatives”. While this is certainly not going to work for all firms, I have to wonder just how often companies in the city that never sleeps need to come up with adverts that they could begin placing that week? I mean has the world really gotten that competitive that a turn around of greater than 24 hours could make or beak you? I think this company has definitely tapped into something and I applaud them for it. I also think that the ultra low costs associated, both in terms of the clients time and money could make this an appealing option perhaps even as a way to test ideas out quickly and efficiently. I also, wonder if it might not be a bit of a flaw that any firm which need to get their ads up in 24 hours either have spent too long working things up beforehand and would care greatly about the quality or they haven’t spent any thought on their promotions and place at all in which case they might just be doomed to fail anyway. If you are an advertising agency that only does work for firms that fail, you might just be gone yourself… in the blink of an eye.

As social beings we rely on rules for direction towards a framework of mutual success. The rules that apply to us vary depending on various general and specific factors including culture, community and gender. Within the business community the rules that guide sustainable long-term success are called ethics. As with any rules, breaking them can result in short-term payoffs yet these benefits are rarely justifiable when facing the consequences of getting caught.

Let us consider in the field of marketing what kinds of unethical behavior might occur and what the consequences for using them would be. Consider a company like MacDonalds. In the age of information consumers are much more difficult to fool and yet if you were to see a photo of any menu item that is being promoted by a fast food chain like MacDonalds and compare it with the product that they actually produce and sell you would find quite a significant difference.

http://www.mcdonalds.ca/ca/en/menu/full_menu/sandwiches.html

MacDonalds is a company that is not known for it’s credibility perhaps this should not come as a surprise. They have even been widely accused of purchasing patties from a company called All Beef in order to be able to falsely advertise. While these claims are in fact false, they do serve to illustrate the point very well that if you lie to your consumer they will naturally grow distrustful. The fast food giant must find that despite these long-term losses to it’s reputation it is still better off driving higher sales at the point of sale by bombarding the hungry customer with an array of gorgeously produced images that represent the perfection of what there menu could be yet is not. It is quite possible that these unethical marketing tactics served the food retailer better in it’s past which would explain the dramatic rise in MDC stock decades ago, however, the long-term effects can be seen as the more recent slow down and finally the drop in value seem this past year. http://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE%3AMCD&ei=RvH8UMCFE-OviAL44QE

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!