Month: June 2011

I recently read Henry Liu’s blog post about Apple’s press conference at the 2011 WWDC , and am once again impressed by Apple’s another terrific performance of managing public relations. In his post, Henry has described huge amount of information unveiled by Apple, including new features of a new version of they operating system and how well the company is doing right. Despite the exciting  new features Apple discusses of every single one of its presentations, to me, Steve Jobs will always steal a lot of attention with his brilliant presentation skills. In fact, Steve Jobs’s confidence and genuine love for his products have become iconic in Apple’s PR activities, helping a lot in persuading developers to work on Apple platforms, earning more loyal customers and generating faith in channel members.

The part of their PR activities that impresses me the most is actually the nature of value-based marketing in their PR strategies. Not only do they constantly unveil new products and features to satisfy Apple fans but they also release corporate information such as the market share of their products and the amount of profits developers earn on their app stores to attract more developers to bring more apps to the Apple app store as well as keep their investors updated about the company’s performance. This action of sharing information covers the interests of both consumers, channel members and investors, thereby helping Apple maintain close relationships with all three parties. Their PR activities, in my opinion, are also what make Apple products seem so personal and friendly whereas we normally see our devices such as phones and computers as tools.

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/some-pretty-insane-stunt-driving-bmw-canada-132451

I recently came across an article at Adfreak that showed some car stunts with BMW’s new M1 series, and it reminded me of how car companies will literally try any promotion method to associate their most expensive and powerful sport cars with madness and insanity. In this M1 video, the car went through a bunch of wall with holes small enough to just let a car pass through at high speed with difficult drifts. Other than M1, Audi also put their R8, the most prestige sport car in their brand, in both Iron Man movies. In the movie, R8 was involved in a lot of explosion and chase scenes, and unsurprisingly, over 20 R8s were destroyed during the filming. As a result, the image of  breath-taking and insane situations for sport cars is definitely the product of over millions of dollars of investments.

With this marketing tactic, car companies are trying to target a specific kind of customers with their premium sport cars. When you see a man or a woman driving Audi R8, BMW M3 or Mercedes SLC, I bet you can almost picture the driver’s personality and attitude of life. Several adjectives such as daring, challenge-loving and adventurous, will immediately come to your mind when you try to describe these drivers’ personalities. And this is exactly what car companies are aiming for. They build a set of human traits around these sport cars with promotions, and thus car buyers will want to buy these cars to signal what kinds of person they are. These signals are so strong that a driver is even forced or propelled to change their characters to fit people’s general ideas about what kind of car drivers should be in a premium sport car.

Before Ipad was released, consumers were not so enthusiastic about computer tablets. Many saw them as inferior laptops or gimmicks with no practical uses mainly because the tablets in the old days lacked functions and smoothness, thus causing all of them to  fail in terms of sales. However, since Ipad has launched, people’s view about tablet has also changed drastically. With high portability, smooth operation systems and great functions, tablets have finally earned a firm place in the mobile device kingdom.

Despite the fact that Ipad single-handedly brought computer tablet’s life cycle back to its growth stage, other tech companies see it as more of a threat than an opportunity. Since the release of Ipad, companies such as Samsung and Blackberry have been busy developing their own tablets, and are eager to bring  them  to consumers’ hands in order to grab a piece of the growing market. One common strategy of their promotions is to target the weakness of Ipad.

As you can see, both commercials, one for Samsung Galaxy tab and one for Blackberry playbook, point out Ipad’s major flaw, the inability to run Flash, and signal to consumers that their tablets have the solutions to this problem. Another funny coincidence is that both commercials use the phrase “unlike some tablets”.

Having followed the tablet industry even since Ipad was launched, I believe I have the reason as to why Blackberry and Samsung will adopt such a strategy in their commercials. One major mistake these companies made was that they were too late to respond to Ipad because of the lack of preparation. Several months after Ipad’s successful release, no company was able to come up with an equally functional tablets. The first official tablet announced by another big  tech company following Ipad’s success was HP slate, and ironically it was canceled later on because of its performance flop. As Ipad safely secures its territory and grows its fan base without any competition, its reputation as the ultimate tablet begins to become a common knowledge. As a result, when you have a rival that is so far ahead in the game, you need to play the game in a way that this opponent does not like. And that is what Samsung and Blackberry did. They designed advertisements that aim to destroy Ipad’s reputation as the perfect tablet.

The variety and depth of entertainments today is tremendously wide, and is still growing rapidly; this allows companies’ marketing departments to take their creativity to the next level by finding out new and effective channels to promote their products. The three videos shown above give us two great examples of creative advertising channels. By pairing Tony Stark with R8 in Iron, Audi successfully created the feeling of prestige and style for its new super sport car. Having a Kinect trailer as the opening of Justin Beaver’s concert, Microsoft not only introduced their new motion controlling device to a good amount of teenager girls but also connected Justin Beaver’s characteristics(cool and fashionable) with a new video game device  of Xbox 360 which used to be associated only with hardcore and violent games. Another new advertising channel with rising popularity is Android and Iphone application store. Needless to say, Smartphone is arguably the hottest product nowadays, and the increasing number of the smartphone users result in more incentives for companies to communicate their brand and products through smartphone applications.

As people these days enjoy the diversity of entertainments, companies are also in need of more variety of skills in their marketing departments to take advantages of all the advertising channels. For example, Starbucks may need programmers and other computer specialists to develop Iphone applications for Starbucks customers as well as update them constantly. Although they may choose to hire outside companies to make the application, they still need employees with computer knowledge to develop a close and long-lasting partnership with these developer companies because their applications need to be updated constantly and upgraded with new techniques coming in the future. Overall, I believe companies need to keep monitoring their customers and updating their marketing departments’ skill inventory in order to effectively utilize the new advertising channels created by new forms of entertainment.