If there is one thing everyone ought to know about marketing, it must be that there’s a lot more to it than just the traditional selling/advertising. In fact, you can “change” the world! Well, maybe not you but the winner of the US 2008 Presidential Election certainly did.

“Mr. Obama won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered here at the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference.”

As you can see, aside from being worshiped as an idol by many of his supporters, Obama also served as an inspiration for marketers. His campaign is one of the largest and most expensive Public Relations(PR) campaign in history and it utilized the most advanced of techniques. For example, they adopted social media as one of its promotional platforms to engage its supporters, allowing them to share their spirit with the rest of the internet. This practice may sound very common and perhaps overused in today’s perspective, but that was back in ’08, a time when some people didn’t even know Facebook existed. As one marketing columnist puts it, “It’s the f**kin’ Web 2.0 thing”.

As a result, a politician of all people topped a long list of corporate elites. Obama came in first with 36.1% of the votes, beating Apple who were at 27.3% while companies like Nike, P&G and Coors didn’t even make the shortlist; McCain was far from the top with only 4.5% of the votes.

So is that how Obama became president; are modern democratic elections really just an elaborate nation wide PR campaign? I’ll leave that for you to figure. The facts remain facts; Obama went from a small time Senator from Illinois to the face of the United States in the span of months. It goes to prove that marketing is beyond just the realm of business. Marketing has very least influenced the fate of global politics, for better or for worse.

Reference:

 Ad Age’s Article

Tema Frank‘s blog posting, “Death of a Salesman … Let Prospects Sell Themselves” , raised some pretty interesting arguments against personal selling. I mean come on, everyone has had some kind of negative experience with sales-people and can find reasons not to like them, but she is proposing we get rid of in-person sales all together and replace them with e-commerce that present the info needed for consumers to make their decisions and automate subsequent transactions.

Her arguments? Sales-people suck and can’t do their job properly while costing companies a fortune in salaries. Computers on the other hand, make less mistakes, provide comprehensive information and present those info on a timely basis to clients’ own homes; Calgary’s Optimum Energy Products Ltd. replaced their outside sales staff with technology and proved successful with a track record of profit growth.

I have to admit she has made some very valid points, at least judging from my experience. For most major purchases I make I tend to do my research well ahead of time. I land on a decision before leaving home and I’m only in the store to carry out the transaction, and yet the sales-person shows-up though I never asked for any help and claims commission for the sale. However, I realize not everyone makes their decisions in this fashion. I’ve witnessed consumers who know nothing of what they are buying and rely on the sales staff completely. To them, this procedure is absolutely necessary, without it they may leave for a competitor’s store due to lack of customer service.

Perhaps in a world where most consumers are self-dependent will this model work. In our world however, especially in B2C, way too many people expect to be served by real people; automation would take away part of the shopping experience.

It was such a short while ago when I met my team and now we have completed the term together. In the last two month we worked cohesively and always completed our work a while before the deadline even. It was a great learning experience for me as well as an awesome team atmosphere where we shared our laughter and joy.

The project itself made us look deeply into the company to come up with insights and suggestions which we would not have otherwise. I didn’t think too much of Lululemon (our chosen company) from my perception but through this project I came to see their unique business strategy. They did many things contrary to common sense but were still able to achieve success, which gave us a lot to contemplate.

I will always remember those long nights when we stayed up to do last minute review and editing. To avoid the confusion caused by all editing at once we broke up the process into sequences by person. So we edited after one another then passed it on to the next person like a relay. We each depended on the person previous and after to do their part correctly and that chained us together, in a good way 🙂

Even with that much rigor we were not perfect in our final results. Now I definitely know what to watch out for in this class (single spacing…) if I was to repeat it again, but given everything else, I have no regrets.

In classes that involve a lot of group work, your team mates make up a least half the experience, and that was a funtastic experience! To any of my team that might be reading this, thank you, and best of luck on your exams 😛