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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.

The ways some companies these days strive to keep their customers always amaze me as well as make me happy as a consumer. One place where you can easily find close company-customer relationships is car dealerships. In my own car buying experiences, most salespeople are willing to negotiate a special deal for each customer with the permissions from their managers even if by making the deal, they will not earn  as much profit as they normally will for that car type. This kind of behaviors is also starting to become more popular among other industries such as the phone companies.

These actions would seem unreasonable a couple years ago, so how companies nowadays justify doing them? One of the main reasons I believe is the shrinking rooms for innovation and hence the increasing cost to truly differentiate your products from the others. For instance, Mercedes revolutionized the way people perceived coupe by releasing the CLS-class, a four-door coupe. However, Mercedes’s advantage earned by the CLS-class has almost disappeared now that other car companies also have their own four-door coupe available, such as Audi’s A7 and BMW’s 5-series. Moreover, companies nowadays have to invest much more recourses into their R&D departments in order to get the same results in the good old days. As a result, they shift their focus to building customer relationships, which in comparison is becoming more profitable. Also another reason, which has something to do with game theory, is companies trying to match competitors’ efforts to perfect customer service. As companies observe this level of efforts spent by their rivals on their customers, they also spend more resources in the same area in order to match the new standard of service quality.

Many companies these days have recognized the deep potential of using their employees to communicate company values to the customers as well as promoting the company and its products in general; in fact, a company’s image among consumers has a lot to do with its employees. For instance, when we think of Apple, one of first few things that pop up in our minds are their employees and some of their unique attributes such as friendliness, cool uniforms  and extroversion. And thus, we also associate these positive qualities with their company, Apple, which demonstrates how important employees are in connecting customers to their company.

There are many ways to get the most out o f your employees’ ability to promote the company, but in my opinion, the one critical element in effectively utilizing this potential is employee training program The training programs are to educate your employees about company values, product knowledge and  how to behave in front of customers, but more importantly, their purpose is to achieve consistency in customer experience. In my own experience, I have mixed feelings about Rogers customer service. When I am on the phone with them, sometimes I will encounter a representative who is really impatient and rude while sometimes I will be talking to a nice and helpful service person. However, my overall experience is flawed because of the inconsistency of Rogers employees’ attitudes. Moreover, this inconsistency can damage the company’s reputation even further as some individuals like me may write our occasionally terrible experience online, causing more customers to stay away from Rogers. As a result, a company needs to make sure this does not happen by implementing systemic and effective employee training programs that reduce unsatisfactory customer experience to a minimal as well as make sure company values are clearly demonstrated through employees.

Before I start, I want you to watch these two videos and think about what they have in common.

Barney Stinson’s video resume

Volkswagen Commercial: The Force

There are several things they have in common. For starters, technically, they are both advertisements, one for promoting a person and one for selling a car. Also, they are both awesome, funny and cool. But there is one key thing they lack in terms of their nature: they both do not tell us anything about the products they are promoting. For example, in Barney’s resume, there is literally no information about his work experience, education or personalities, while in Volkswagen’s commercial, there is not a single word spoken, and the whole commercial is about a kid in Darth Vader’s suite.  Yet both advertisements are very successful at getting people’s attention, and in fact The Force won the best commercial during the super bowl this year. The message they send is that advertisements are about getting maximum attention instead of trying to get people to know the products.

As the time-poor society becomes more diverse and overwhelmed in terms of entertainments and information,  this trend in advertisements appears more obvious and growing stronger. Instead of selling the key concept or the major function of a product, a successful commercial is creative and interesting; it also often shows something very personal and related to our lives as well as connects it with the product. My own experience also reflects this whole idea. During a commercial period, I often have my Ipad or laptop at hands, and the only commercials that grab my attention are the ones that are cool and funny. Advertisements that throw technical terms, such as a new technology for television or functions of a new computer tablet, at me often do not leave a single mark in my memory at all. This also illustrates that people’s opportunity cost for commercial is increasing as there are many other forms of entertainments that steal the spotlights of advertisements. As a result, in order to compete for our attentions, I believe the element of creativity will take an even greater part in future commercials, and the effectiveness of information-oriented advertisement will diminish eventually to the point where it is barely worth the money.

More and more I am noticing that many companies focus their attention and recourses on building their company and product image; companies’  budgets for promotion and campaign can easily match or even overwhelm the money spent on developing a product. For instance, during the fourth quarter of last year, Microsoft released two huge products, Kinect for Xbox 360 and Window phone 7, and they spent half a billion dollars on advertisements for each product. Another obvious and popular example is Apple. Many people, mostly experts on computers and phones, argue that Apple does not have the best smartphones and laptops on the market, and many other devices have better specs and functions. However, despite the high prices, these two products are arguably the most popular of their kinds as of now.

Given these examples, one will ask why companies nowadays will be willing to spend so much money on promoting their brand and how these actions result in a success? Here is my take and observation. For products such as video games, computers and cars, I believe it is safe to say that the majority are not experts. For example, when my mother goes to stores to look for computers, the only knowledge she has about this kind of products are brand names.  As this fact becomes more obvious, companies realize the key to success is to implant the belief that their products are the best in people’s minds rather than keep on expanding their products with streams of money. Once a company build a strong and unique image in a society, it is very hard for other companies to copy, and it becomes a free advertising machine as it becomes the topic of people’s conversations.

With this said, I am not claiming that a product’s quality is not important to a company’s success. But perfecting a product is very costly and time-consuming. With today’s technologies and competitiveness, finding an blatant edge in your product is almost impossible unless you has a lengthy head start before everyone else, like Microsoft. To conclude, I believe the main solution to success is to combine these two elements: first identify the special quality a company will stick with and then magnify it to the public. Plus, once this strategy succeeds and gives you the attention and sales you need, you will have more budgets to spend on improving the products and thus make a few more steps ahead of your rivals.

Today I had my last class for Comm 299, and if I could, I would really love to learn further about searching for job opportunities and how to grab attention from employers. For me, the most valuable skill I have acquired from the Comm 299 is how to create opportunities for my career. Before I took Comm 299, I never knew that there were so many ways to approach my employers, make connections and seek job opportunities. One of the most interesting techniques I learned in the course is to propose a new job to the employers and convince or motivate them to create that position just for me. I also learn a lot of useful websites such as linked-in from Comm 299, and I think those websites will be very useful for creating opportunities for my career.

Of course, Comm 299 also taught me solid ways and knowledge of writing a resume and cover letter. These basic skills are required to apply for jobs, so if it was not for Comm 299, my resume and cover letter would probably get disregarded because of formats, and thus I would not even be considered for the position. As a result, these skills are basic yet critical skills.

Another important lesson I learned from the course is what kinds of personal quality are appealing in the business world. I now know that I have to be confident, genuine, self-engaged and passionate. These qualities are the ones that will gain me the attention of potential employers. The course also gave me the encouragement I needed to build up these qualities and this become a successful business person in the future.

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