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