Recently in my attempts to find my own used car to purchase, I turned to craigslist to look for a suitable vehicle that fits my needs at an affordable price. The thing about the website that surprised me the most is that there are so many different ads available and all the ads are categorized in a very easy and organized way. I can even narrow down my search parameters from all cars+trucks to just one specific car such as “Honda civic” and it would return results without any outliers that does not match my search.
Not only is the site convenient in that you can find practically anything, for most ads, all the information you need is given to you in a simple way where some even have pictures. While looking down the list you are given the name of the product and the price right away. This simple website allows sellers to provide all 4 P’s easily making it accessible to everyone and free to do. The product, price, and place and all be shown on the details of the ad while the site itself takes care of the promotion aspect since many internet users use craigslist to find products aside from retail stores. The advantage of using craigslist is that you can find the same products for cheaper albeit used making it a great deal for both parties involved. People can market everything from clothes, cars, houses, jobs, services, and even themselves on the “personals” section.
You can find almost anything on Craigslist
Craigslist has become the Ultimate self marketing tool in the information era, making use of the internet and its ability to connect people who otherwise wouldn’t interact with each other. It is a great example of how marketing has developed with improvements in technology making it simpler, faster and accessible.
The marketing for a motor vehicle can be a pretty big thing since buying a car is a pretty large and important investment to a person who makes a fairly average income. There are a lot of commercials that market cars for different brands but we know that since the purchase of a car is such a significant investment, one usually goes to a show room to personally see the vehicle and even test drive the car to see if it suits their needs. One way that Motor companies market their products is through an Automotive trades show, one specific local one is the Vancouver International Auto Show.
Having been to a Vancouver Auto Show before, it seems pretty bland because the majority of the vehicles you see are not the exotic and expensive ones that you only see in movies but the cars you see on the road everyday. And most of these everyday models are already on the road so there is really nothing new here. The true purpose of the Vancouver Auto Show is to provide what is essentially a large show room that exhibits many different cars from different motor companies. This allows consumers who are looking to buy a new car to immediately compare products from different companies with vehicles that target the same market.
An exhibit of the new Honda Civic
The Auto Show provides one place for motor companies to market their products along with providing information about the specifications and price of the product from an employee at each exhibit. This effectively centralizes all 4 P’s into one place, the only thing the Auto Show lacks is the ability to test drive the vehicle. So if you plan to go to the Auto Show expecting amazing cool things, like I did, you will be sorely disappointed. Maybe thats just what the child in me wants to see, exciting and new things but its actually a marketing scheme that really tries to target those looking to buy a car in the near future, not necessarily Auto enthusiasts as the name of the show suggests.
I never got into the trend of drinking coffee everyday as it slowly drains your money on something that becomes a necessity after awhile, also in the long run coffee is not very healthy for you. So then why would any rational person become a slave to coffee companies like Starbucks and Blendz for a cup of joe that gives a short term boost of energy and cause people to believe that they are dependent on the stuff. And while looking at Carina Ip’s blog, I realized that there was a marketing formula for such a success if one can see it from the big picture.
Obviously the biggest thing that sells the product for Starbucks is the branding, Starbucks is now a name synonymous with coffee, and not just any coffee, specialty coffee. But how did it get that power to be recognizable to almost everyone in more economically developed countries? Because of their customer service, their easily accessible locations, their quality product, and their efficient operations. There is almost a Starbucks every two or so blocks in an urban city making it extremely easy to find increasing the accessibility and exposure of the brand and product. Customers who purchase the product not only purchase the specialty coffee but they also purchase the happy and efficient customer service that makes customers return for more. And altogether it creates an extremely strong brand that has become the leader in its market of specialty coffee stores.
This doesn’t mean that I will start to become a loyal customer of Starbucks, but it is easy to see why someone would become so fond of something that provides such features and the brand of Starbucks with its logo give the consumer the comfort of know that they will receive what they are expecting.
Since our blog assignment requires us to post a blog about someone else’s blog outside of the classrom I did what came naturally to any student and google “marketing blog” and sure enough I found a perfect example with Micheal Fleischner’s The Marketing Blog at the top of the list (thank god for google). And while scrolling through his posts and found and interesting blog about the criteria that is requried for marketing to be considered “good marketing”. Even though it was subjective from the blog writer’s point of view, it provides a lot of insight into the possible objectives of what marketers are trying to accomplish or what they should be accomplishing. While reading through the criteria, it look to me like it was extremely tricky to achieve “good marketing” and is reinforced by one of his opening statements that it was easy to find bad marketing and challenging to find good marketing. The criteria is as follows:
1) Does the marketing speak to the target market or audience?
2) Does the marketing reasonate or appeal to the market?
3) Are the marketing campaigns timed properly
4) Create a dialogue and receive feedback from the audience
This criteria should apparently improve a company’s marketing results. Reading through the list it seems very similar to the communication process of sender, encoding, response and feedback. It also seems to follow the AIDA model for product promotion. Seeing that such guidelines are recommened and adhered to by marketers seemingly everywhere, the success of such a strategy should be consistently successful. This just goes to show how applicable the things we learn in comm 296 really are in the real world outside of school.
Over the past few years there have been a surge of new applications for smart phones such as Blackberry, iphone and android products. This is because an increasing number of people are using smartphones instead of traditional cell phone because of its ability to use 3G networking and its connection to the internet on the go. With the introduction of online applications for smartphones comes a new platform for marketers to promote their product as an application or as ads connected to an application. As I have a smartphone myself, I have noticed that many ads that come along with the games I download for my phone which at times is very irritating.
Some have taken advantage of the growing popularity of apps and have developed apps that help promote their products. One such app is the Canucks App for Blackberry, iphones and more recently android phones allowing fans to keep updates with the newest Canucks information on games or otherwise.
Not only does this app promote the main product, the Vancouver Canucks hockey club, but it also provides a service to fan pertaining to the organization with information and if the user paid a fee, live streamed games. I think that the introduction of this app is a great way to reach out to their fans and shows how much they appreciate them. Other teams have also supported the use of mobile apps to reach out to their fan base. This kind of application has also resonated well with soccer, football, basketball, and other major sports leagues. This just goes to show the breadth that marketing has and how it adapts to new technology. With the success of these applications it makes one wonder how intrusive marketing will get to in the near future as it is already with us in our pockets.
While browsing through the blogs of other students, this one blog caught my attention as it was based off her own personal experience. The blog I am referring to is Kathy Yu’s blog about Amazon and how she finally managed to get her product after two years, yet still has the decency to say that they have exceptional customer service. If you haven’t read her blog you may be thinking, “is this girl delusional” and in her defense she isn’t. She has just been successfully convinced through the company providing the high quality service AFTER being contacted by Kathy and her father, with the company’s low prices and quick response it was enough to get Kathy and her father comfortable and loyal to the Amazon brand. However in the big picture one should realise that having excellent customer service requires them to consistently provide such service without being prompted to do so by an angry phone call.
And to top it off, as consequence of Amazon’s initial blunder is that they have a pair of happy and extremely patient customers who have become loyal and have started to market their product their brand for them through word of mouth (or blog, I guess). It is interesting to see how marketing is used to recover from an incident or flaw that might tarnish the image of their company, but I must commend the staff at Amazon for a job well done, at least for this case. I would think that the use of the customer service line is something you wouldn’t want to have to go through in order to receive good customer service but maybe they were just so excited to get their product they couldn’t care less.
As you might have realized, I am fairly interested in video games and I have come across another interesting find concerning video games. Every week there is information or a trailer released to introduce a new game that is in production but this one trailer has garnered so much interest that there are already plans to make the game into a movie. And this is before the game is even released. For the majority of the games that have been converted into movies (e.g. resident evil, doom, etc.), the producers evaluate the popularity of the game through its sales before actually starting a project based on the video game. However the producers at the Sean Daniel Company and Union Entertainment have decided to create a movie from the game purely from the seeing the trailer for the game. And after seeing how the trailer marketed the game its understandable why they did:
The trailer for the game, named Dead Island, has such a theatrical feel to it that the producers have decided to make the movie similar to the trailer a-la memento style filming where scenes are shown in reverse chronological order. Currently Deep Silver, the company developing the Dead Island game, has not sold rights to the game to make a movie because the want to be sure that any movie made from the game is of a quality they are comfortable with. This trailer goes to show that marketing not only influences a company’s intended market but those outside of it. Furthermore this trailer had such a huge influence on the movie producers that they would consider presenting the film in a similar manner to the trailer. It goes to show that quality marketing is very effective or maybe even more so than marketing a product many times which could be very costly.
I know that this has probably brought up way too many times within the past week but I’ve decided to discuss about the Super owl commercials… yeah I know I should think of something original but when you’ve got something to work with that’s right in your face, why not take the chance to use it! But I’m not talking about a specific commercial, but the commercials for the Super Bowl in general in terms of STP (segmentation, targeting, and positioning). Its interesting to see how the companies segment people who watch the Super Bowl with the types of commercials they produce. With ads like this:
It seems as if the companies are trying to appeal to lazy couch potatoes of a specific gender….men. The other companies who produced commercials for this specific time included the likes of Audi, Bridgestone, Brisk, Budweiser, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Coca-cola, and Pepsi. All of which appeal to men who are apparently only interested in cars, drinks or snack foods. Its obvious that these companies have segmented and targeted this specific market and to finish their campaign off they positioned it in a time slot that the majority of men in North America are likely to see. These products should be readily available to almost every consumer in North America so the biggest problem for the companies now is to market them and with STP the commercial time slots for the Super Bowl have been the most sought-after times for American Television every year. To emphasize how important this time slot is, many companies place extra expenses into making a commercial to impress people just for that time slot and nowhere else. These commercials have become highly anticipated almost as much as the Super Bowl itself and tend to be innovative and funny, with a 30 second spot costing a company around $2.7 million.
To finish this post off I think I should end it with another $2.5+ million Super Bowl commercial:
In class today we went over the concept of market research and simulated and example of it using cookies and flat coke. The exercise brought up issues that one would encounter if they were to do market research, however the idea of using market research as a form of marketing itself was never brought up. This idea of using market research as a form of marketing, was demonstrated to me through an ad for a video game that I have been interested in called Dead Space 2. The ad used market research as a facade to gain the opinions of mothers on the particular video game, embracing the idea that if a mother disapproves of something, it is “cool”. The video shows their reactions after viewing clips of the video game:
After viewing the ad and watching the reactions of the mothers, I saw that the ad took a step in a very interesting direction in using market research as a form of marketing itself and the use of others dislike of the product to market it. You may think that I’m sadistic but, I found it quite humorous to watch the reactions of the mothers even when some looked like they were on the verge of crying. While I don’t agree that the disapproval of a mother determines how “cool” something is, I think that the ad provides an interesting and daring perspective of marketing an already successful product. This ad is one of many for the product which is being heavily marketed even after the release of the game using viral videos and more traditional ads such as this one.
Because of its marketing, the game has become fairly well known and is one of the most successful horror video games to date.
Since it has been well publicized, Toyota has seen a lot of negative press lately over the safety of their cars, especially in North America. This is because of an incident where a man named James Sikes, lost control of his Toyota Prius and it started accelerating without him stepping on the pedal. This sparked a lot of controversy concerning the safety of Toyota vehicles and led to a huge drop in sales for the company due to the negative press. This change in consumer behavior is due to a change in attitudes of the consumers towards the product. The public’s view towards the company changed causing them to see their vehicles as dangerous and unsafe. In response to this Toyota recalled its vehicles to repair any problems that may occur for other drivers.
This MacLeans article provides a different perspective to the problems with the vehicles also identifying the woes of the company mainly due to journalism, opportunity and idiocy. Furthermore the faults in the vehicles has been determined to be ” not electronic but mechanical, caused by ill-fitting floor mats in some models and sticky pedals in others.” The article states that it is also the responsibility of the drivers to have a knowledge of how their car works as well as to drive safely. The inability of the drivers to practice these skills also magnifies the problems with the cars yet these drivers are not willing to face the fact that they are partially at fault and would rather place the blame on someone else.
In order to repair the company’s image, Toyota has developed the star safety system that has been implemented in all of their newer models and has placed ads such as this one to re-educate the consumers about their product and change their attitude towards it:
