Image from: National Geographic

Reflecting on the marketing team project was actually fairly easy for me. On the whole the team worked out fairly well. We all had our strengths and our weaknesses and were able to compensate each other. As far as the work distribution goes, it worked fairly well. I ended up doing a little bit more of the work on the video but only because I already had the knowledge of the programs and owned them. So overall the workload was fair.

The project itself was hard but actually interesting, versus projects that I have had that are just hard. I did like that the last part built upon the pervious assignments which made me grateful that we put a fair the amount of work into those other parts.

As far as the video portion goes, I have mixed feelings. On one hand the video was great, it was awesome to see something different in class compared to the old presentation and feedback that we do in pretty much all other classes. However, on the other side of the coin it was quite difficult to convey all the information we needed to, but still be creative. Doing a presentation on this subject would definitely have been easier but they may not be a good thing.

Class wise, I found marketing class to be far more engaging than most of my classes. Tamar was a great teacher and was awesome at engaging the class and keeping the content upbeat. I think that her teaching style is clearly a product of how passionate she is for the content and the industry and that makes my intrest in the content increase a 100 times over.

A post in The Globe and Mail talked about the rise in the organic foods market, growing from a 1 to 3 billion dollar industry in 7 years. The article enteres the converation by talking about a study where identical organic cookies were sampled by participants with one of the cookies being labelled as organic. Participants responded to the cookie being labelled

Image from: The Globe and Mail

as organic as being “tastier, lower in fat and calories, higher in fibre, and more nutritious than the (identical) regular products”.  The study then went on to conclude the people perceptions cloud their decision making abilities.

This article was very interesting in that it talks about consumers perception and a phenomenon known as the “health halo effect”. It talks about how the organic theme in our society is so synonymous with being healthier people will pay more for it without finding out what makes it more organic and if it is actually healthier for you.

This actually got me thinking about an example of when simply having people perceive your product one way can actually make them take it at face value. At the university there is a specific type of garbage bag that is used in certain areas that is green coloured and says degradable on it. Further investigation into them shows that they are not biodigrdable nor are they any diffirent for any other garbage bag besides being a brighter shade of green. This may point to another phenomenon called “green washing” where products are designed to look more environmentally friendly by simply being green.

Both these situations really opened my eyes to see how easy it is to alter peoples perception about  what a product does by simply influencing the way they see it. This may also shed light on society as whole, where we have become complacent in not digging deeper than face value when it comes to buying deaccessions.

I recently read a post about the effectiveness of videos in marketing. The post by Ford Kanzier goes on to talk about how “adding video boosts customer engagement nearly five times over print-only content”.

This post really got me thinking about how we market products and the discussions in class about benefits and not features. The post talks about how videos are few and far between in comparison to print in the marketing world and the ones that are out there are “deadly boring”.

Continuing with the thought of benefits and not features the post talks about how marketers should focus on customers’ pain relief or successes instead of brand. This entire notion is really interesting. If what he says is true than it does bring up thoughts about how important the marketing of your product is anyways. While it is important to have a good product it seems more important to have people connect to your company instead.

This entire post has me thinking about how I could essentially copy a product already on the market, alter it an insignificant way, and then sell it and possibly make decent sales, so long as my advertising better connectes my target segments to my company through advertising that promoted customer success rather than the actual product.

The post goes on to talk about the company Caterpillar which makes

Image: www.foreverparts.net

construction equipment and how there was a advertising video that taked about what their products were doing to help people while only mentioning their brand once. We have seen several videos similar to that in class where brand is not the main focus which also sheds light on how important even the brand is compared to the emotions that advertisements are trying to elicit.

It really makes me think exactly what companies and trying to market in a strange existential way.

Here is a link to Caterpillars video.

This is a response to Jonathan Harrison’s blog post Capturing the Power of a Social Chain Reaction.

As a incoming BTM major and all around nerd when it comes to computers and tech stuff I read Jonathan’s blog with the glee of a small child in a candy store. His article talks about how powerful viral video are and why aren’t companies taking advantage of this growing trend.

Along with that sentiment Jonathan also talks about while viral videos are powerful how important and difficult it is to create one. The extreme difficulty of creating something funny yet not too funny that your message gets lost.

This got me thinking about how there are companies/people out there leveraging all this kind of stuff to learn about people. There was a TED talk I watched where they were using Twitters  API to look at trends and even cooler look at where people where flying from and to.

Image from Google

They were able to search and collect data for a specific time in which they collected any information regarding a tweet about someone flying somewhere and then also collected where that user was posting from. By doing that they are able to show when/where people were flying for a given period. That ability to harness free and seemingly meaningless information is amazing. They go on to explain how that information was then used to look at how a disease could spread in a global scale.

While thee may not be too many people doing what Jonathan as talking about, there are definitely people out there that are thinking the same way. I am sure that this example is just the tip if the ice burg in social media.

This is a response to Rohit Bhargava’s blog post on Coke. 

Rohit’s blog talked about a campaign Coke started in the beginning of the year revolving around the obesity and how they were against it. He goes on to explain 4 main point on why he thinks they are doing it:

Photo by: Coke

1. Public pressure

2. Negative reputation of high fructose corn syrup

3. Commitments to health matter more at the start of the year

4. Focusing on health can make competitors look unfeeling or out of touch.

1. Rhoit talks about the fact that public pressure is one the main reasons Coke started this campaign is note worthy. I thought that as obesity rates continue to rise it was natural for Coke to try and proactively tackel the issue. While this may be one of the main reasons Coke started this campaign it is not one of the more exciting things to talk about.

2. In the blog he goes on to talk about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and how there has been more awareness of its dangerous in the general public. Considering that Coke does use HFCS a lot in their main products it is not a surprise that they would try and mitigate this thereat. What was surprising is that HFCS is going through such a harsh criticism that corn refiners attempted to rebrand HFCS however, it did in the end fail to do so.

3/4. While it is interesting that Coke decided to launch it in the beginning of the year to possibly play up the resolution card what is far more interesting is the effect the campaign has on Coke’s competitors. Coke has been able to possibly move ownership on to Pepsi by being the first to tackle the issue. Especially considering that Pepsi was the sponsor for the Superbowl and that may have just reminded people about the dangerous of pop just by seeing the brand.

There were a lot of possible reasons on why Coke started this campaign. I think that the biggest reason is an attempt to make its competitors look worse rather than a genuine care for people. By being the first to talk about the elephant in the room it could move the ownership of the problem towards Pepsi by attaching a “what are they doing about” stigma to Pepsi.

Here is a link to one of their advertisements.

Source: Amazon.com

In August of last year the Company Bic (a famous pen manufacturer) launched a new line of pens. This line was designed to engage and attract the female market towards buying more of their products.

As noted on a CBC article, the pens packaging includes taglines such as: “the pen essentially for women!”, and “a thin barrel designed to fit a women’s hand”. While these tag lines are an unfortunate marketing mistake it was not the tipping point for public criticism and negative attitudes towards the company. Bic in addition to launching the product through Amazon and Brick and Motor stores ran an ad campaign, the most noteworthy of which is this one.

When I first found out about this product my initial reaction was actually one of indifference. I saw nothing wrong with this product and in fact thought that it was interesting that Bic had never had a line of pen colors like this before. I noticed that my attitude towards these pens was heavily influenced by my experiences, the most impacting of which is the fact that I am a male.

As I learned more about the product and found out why Bic was running this marketing strategy and what was actually printed on the packaging, I realized that their target market was completely missed and was in fact against them.

Gender stereotyping was the tagline for this marketing mishap. The fact that Bic’s message was interpreted by their target demographic (women) as a pen made for women because they can’t handle a man’s pen was a gross oversight by Bic. Rather than targeting women in a way that makes them appear unequal to men, Bic should have found a way to market to the women demographic without pigeonholing them into a sex that loves pink, purple, and soft feeling things.

As I searched the internet for more info on this I stumbled onto this funny YouTube video about “Bic for Her”.