Month: November 2010

So …..the Japanese domestic fashion market is currently valued $$$90,000,000,000$$$ and it is said among many japanese marketing professionals that it had the potential to grow to 120 billion at its peak, although it never did reach such value.

From reading up on articles and watching the news, it seems that factor that is inhibiting the japanese domestic fashion market to grow to its full potential is that there are many foreign brands being imported and people are buying into their marketing strategies.

In my personal opinion, the vast majority of the domestic brands offer higher quality products at a more reasonable price in comparison to foreign brands which are marketed very well but have low quality and are more pricy considering the quality of their products.

There are probably many ways to resolve this problem that the japanese fashion market. One of the most obvious and easy ways to achieve this is to copy the strategies that the major foreign fashion brands are utilizing such as Hollister who sells the image of  youth and sex along with their products.

I am not in favor of this strategy since this would damage the high quality and unique design brand image of japanese apparel thus it would be a major market repositioning project for the entire industry. But…..the perception of a brand image may differ in different parts of the world thus this strategy may be worthwhile utilizing if the target market pool is likely be accepting and open about the repositioning.

In my opinion, the japanese fashion industry should look towards selling towards the rapidly emerging chinese consumer pool. Especially because the internet user pool in chinese is among the biggest in the world, e-commerce may be an effective way to penetrate into their market.

This blog post will be a commentary on “Rich’s Marketing Blog“<http://www.richsmarketingblog.com/mcdonalds-twitter-promotion-of-new-mcrib-backfires-badly/social-media/>; specifically on the blog post “McDonalds Twitter promotion of new McRib backfires badly”

Twitter is a major marketing channel for many corporations nowadays. But it seems that a considerable amount of risk is also incurred if the project is undertaken. According to “Rich’s Marketing Blog” the mcdonalds’ marketing attempt to use twitter was a catastrophic accident for the corporation.

But….. considering the size impact that twitter had on the consumers, if used appropriately, twitter may become an extremely low financial cost, convenient, timely, and last but  not least powerful marketing tool.

So what kind of ways could or should you use twitter and what are the kind of impacts that it could have? In my opinion, there is too much of a risk to open up to the vast public to retweet and respond to tweets of an entire company. Thus it may be a good idea to limit the profile and tweets to certain accounts on twitter. There are several key advantages to limiting profile and sharing tweets among the important personnel is that it helps in managing the risk of consumers spreading the “bad mouth”. Also, it can be used as a way to stay in touch with important personalities within the top management and the important business partners as well as prospective business partners; partners and associated business executives will be able to grasp a better idea and might even retweet the corporate tweets to advertise the company; tweets made by important corporate executives are much more convincing than the company selling itself through its own tweets.

Personally, I think that Starbucks has done a good job at branding itself and utilizing twitter as a marketing tool. They have used it as a channel of communication to gather ideas for their new products as well as update their progress with developing and incorporating the ideas that they have gathered. This not only makes the process of product brainstorming more effective and efficient but it also makes the consumers more involved in the whole process of corporate operation thus created value and loyalty over time.

This blog post will reflect and elaborate the issues and ideas that William Dorr raised in his Marketing blog post “Subliminal Marketing Author”: https://blogs.ubc.ca/willdorr/.

Surprisingly, I have thought about the ethics of subliminal marketing over the past few years after i developed an interest for the marketing industry. Many advertisers would probably say it is a strategic method in order to sell their product and their brand.

Perhaps subliminal marketing may sound slightly sneaky and dishonest. The level of subliminal effect most likely differ on the product and how it is delivered. I think that there are acceptable level of subliminal marketing and unacceptable levels of subliminal marketing. And by varied acceptability of subliminal marketing by different levels, I meant the intentions behind the marketing strategy determines the level of a specific subliminal effects either ethical or unethical.

Say that there was an advertisement about a chocolate bar. If it subliminally gives the impression that it has special effects that it does not have and the marketers are fully aware of this, this would be unethical.

On the other hand, if under a limited time frame, markers were asked to some how deliver all of the wonderful elements and features of a product and that marketers could not use explicit methods in delivering the benefits that come along with the product, then it is ethical, in my opinion, to use subliminal to deliver sufficient information to the consumers so they can make a purchasing decision.