After reading Heidi Hargreaves’ post on “Humor and the Beer Industry”, it got me thinking to how important this trait is in the world nowadays. For me personally, the commercials and marketing campaigns that stay in my mind the longest are the funny ones. I’m always telling my friends or relatives about this really funny commercial I saw that they just have to see, and pass it on. One of my favorites, is the recent Expedia.ca commercial in which the same actor is used for every character in the commercial. Another very successful campaign that revolves around humor is the Old Spice campaign featuring the “Old Spice guy” Isaiah Mustafa.

This campaign has continued for quite some time, even bringing in a copyright concern with Dairy Queen trying to mimic the Old Spice strategy, using their own guy with the same sort of style. What intrigues me most about this ad campaign is Proctor & Gambles use of innovation to break into a market that previously wanted nothing to do with its products. Old Spice was generally known as a “old man” brand and did not appeal to younger consumers. What Old Spice managed to do was look at its options and the markets it had yet to break in to. Using humor, wit and a unique twist P&G was able to smash into the younger market, causing both young males and females to talk about their hilarious commercials. One of the most effective strategies used by P&G was to direct these commercials at women as well, by indicating their Old Spice guy was “the man your man could smell like”. This campaign has played a significant role in allowing Old Spice to crash its way into the younger market, proving the effectiveness of humor in commericals.

After reading Melissa Lim’s blog post on Organizational Culture, I began to think about how important this concept is in my own life as well. My family runs a few Subway Sandwich restaurants, one of which I had the opportunity to manage on my own this past summer. My dad and I discovered how our employees lacked these shared values and beliefs on how to act in an organization, and how they mainly focused on what was important to them and not to the business itself. We eventually realized that getting employees to intrinsically care about a business that isn’t their own is going to be a very tough task.

We also decided to implement a sort of Customer First strategy in which we attempted to train our employees with the correct etiquette around a customer. This included keeping questions and sentences about the customers order short and sweet; all while making a customer feel at home by effectively striking a casual conversation. The simple solution we initially used was to utilize the resources offered to us free of charge. The Subway Corporation has many courses online which we could get our employees to complete so they have a better understanding of the business. Also, offering simple incentives worked as well. We organized many little contests in which our employees joined in on friendly competition, at the end of which prizes were given to those who were at the top. At first this seemed like it would cause employees to become selfish in competition, but we also organized pizza parties and group prizes for the whole staff whenever we have a successful week to show our appreciation.

Doing simple things like this allowed our business to grow significantly and guided all our employees along one strong, unified, and effective path.

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Hi everybody,

My name is Jag Dhatt, and I am a 2^nd Year Sauder student. I am taking marketing because it is mandatory, but I also have a significant interest in it. I am considering marketing for my specialization in 3^rd year, but haven’t quite made up my mind yet. Even so, I’m still curious to learn how ads can be used to manipulate the minds of consumers. It interests me to realize how the smallest detail in a ad of some sort can prove to be the most vital in the convincing those to believe in the message that the ad is telling. I remember hearing somewhere that McDonalds chose the colors red and yellow because apparently those are colors that make you hungry, which then got me wondering how much planning went into this when they decided to do this, and questions such as how was research conducted to conclude that these were in fact hunger-inducing colors.

One of my favorite commercials is the Skittles commercial in which everything the man touches turns into Skittles.  I felt the sarcastic comedy of the commercial allowed viewers to stay intrigued, and gave it a sort of storyline, which in the end allowed to commercial to portray the Skittles message with the viewer completely focused on the commercial. The commercial is very humorous which grasps the attention of a majority of consumers. The fact that it was played by an elderly man along with middle aged supporting actors, yet it was humorous shows that the commercial can be directed at all age groups.

About myself, I used to play extensive amounts of basketball, but don’t do it as much anymore (hoping that will soon change). I love watching a variety of sports including basketball, soccer, hockey etc. I’ve lived in Vancouver my whole life and still absolutely love it here.

Looking forward to this class and to get to know more of you!