NJS Marketing Blog

There are so many brands of car in the market nowadays. I have watched more that a thousands ads that promote the different brands of cars using different marketing or psychology tactics. But the question arises on why I am still a loyal supported of Mercedes Benz. Why if given the opportunity, I will go for Mercedes without a second thought?

Back in Malaysia, due to tax, the most affordable Mercedes which is a C-class costs RM 250,000? Other same luxury cars like Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are only about RM 150,000. What makes the difference so huge that it will cost the customers another RM 100,000 just to get the most affordable Mercedes?

If you are a non car lover, you might just think that the company has overprice its cars in order to obtain a high profit margin. Or, maybe you might think that it is due to the specifications of the car, the quality of the car. However, I think it’s way beyond the quality of the car.

Almost in every drama in Asian country, Mercedes Benz’s cars are used to symbolize wealth of the characters. Just like Nike, Apple, Starbucks and other consumer product brands, Mercedes Benz is undeniably a symbol of status and image. Mercedes users are projected to be cool, classy, rich, stylish and so on. They are willing to pay a very high price for a Mercedes because the enjoy the positive reinforcements that are created by using the car.

Mercedes ads often relate stylish main characters, businessmen, with their cars. This is their marketing strategy, which is to relate Mercedes with high status. It’s worth a lot more than a Camry it provides a higher level of customer values to their consumers. When the people look at their cars, they will think of “Ooh it’s a Mercedes Benz.” That’s why Mercedes is able to maintain it’s image as the leader of the luxurious car industry.

Hello to everyone out there!

To be honest, this is the first time I blog. If not because of marketing, I think I will not have an opportunity to start. To start off, I want to briefly introduce myself to do some basic marketing or branding of myself.

I am a Malaysian, and a sponsored student by the Malaysian government. As a member of the Sauder’s community, I have the same interest as the others in the faculty which is to learn the philosophy of the business world, most importantly, the skills to earn billions and millions of money.

In the quest of achieving my target, I believe in the power of marketing. I always have a flaming passion in marketing especially advertising and packaging. To accumulate experience and also to test out my talent in marketing, I ran my own noodle stall business back in my country, Malaysia. To run a food business, it is not as easy as preparing nice food. It requires a good marketing mix to ensure the success of my business. As a result, I needed a variety of good products, reasonable pricing, convenient location and also effective promotions.

To compete with the other restaurants, I innovated a wide variety of noodles and invented a system to maintain the quality of the noodles that can function smoothly without a main chef. Since I was still a beginner, I surveyed the price of my competitors and set the price of my noodles generally lower than the my competitors to attract and build up my customer base. To make my noodles look more appealing, I took photos of the selections of noodles provided by my stall and designed a menu. It created a strong visual effect to persuade the customers to try my noodles.

The efforts that I put in seem to work as the profit per month increases consistently since the stall was started. The sales had improved by more than 300% after 3 years of operating. Although I am here in Vancouver, my business still performs well under the assistance of my partner who is my mother.