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Marketing

Everyone would be attracted

Nando’s Chicken, a casual dining restaurant, redesigned its Canada official website and greatly captured my eyes and desire to try out their food. I encountered their website by chance and fell in love immediately.

With mimicking the actual store visiting experience, the website is designed to look like a real family-kitchen store. When you click on the enter button on the door appearing on the homepage, you will be lead into an online “kitchen” where you have the access to its deals, reciperis and everything you can think of about the restaurant and also you could view interesting animations for fun with your mouse putting on the furnitures in the kitchen which have no labels on.

This online advertising caters to the ongoing social trend which advocates researching online first before dining out. Additionally, being an informative and persuasive ads for new customers as well as reminder for old customers, this online website sets a really good example for other stores for being creative but not overdo. Being cost-effective, online website has been more and more adopted by many marketers, but only those with creative ideas could appeal to customers. Furthermore, being concise and attractive at the same time, Nando’s Chicken’s official website can be considered as a perfect example of AIDA model as it successfully draws customers’ attention at the very first time when people see its website and its great creative animation design evokes visitors’ interests as well as desire and finally lead to the action for actually dining out in the restaurant.

I, myself would try this interesting restaurant soon with my friends during the finals and see what the real store looks like to complete the action process.;)

Categories
Marketing

Apple’s iAD meets Print Advertising

I found this Youtube video really fantastic.

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We can easily get the idea that AXA has created an excellent advertisement that shows the new age of advertising at its best: a press insertion directs the reader to place their iPhone over an empty space on the page.

With this creative advertisement, AXA undoubtedly captured every customer’s attention successfully and paves its way to another successful round of promotion. The development of iAd extends the life cycle of print advertising, avoiding its disadvantages from a traditional perspective and cracks a new way to attract new customers. Using the cross promotion method, Apple and AXA successfully promote both products without stirring up any major conflicts between them.

However, we can hardly ignore that this advertisement for AXA can only target iPhone users which is currently not a particularly big market and could’t be the major and only  target market of AXA. Additionally, as it obviously involves high-tech which wouldn’t be cheap, we would easily come up with the question that would this ad be cost-effective? Is it a worthy risk that AXA should have taken? However, we all know that the market for iPhone is steadily growing and this ad could bring large profits to AXA from a long-term perspective.

It’s really good to see creative ideas in advertising and lots of customers would always love to see and try out fancy stuff. But marketer should always watch out that creativity must not overshadow the message they want to convey and be sure that the audience is the one they are intending to target and also never take the risks that they might not be able to afford afterwards.

Categories
Internal Link Marketing

Amazing Creative Packaging

I was captured by the blog posting A girl’s best friend 🙂 of Vivian. She talked about how the tiny blue box with the white ribbon from Tiffany&Co could relate every generation of customers and influence them to purchase it. And yes, I also fell in love with the packaging right after I saw the picture and just as she described, I would be really happy to get the gift with this packaging regardless what would be inside. And yes again, that’s the power of packaging.

I started to search for some creative packaging and  found the video below about soda seal packaging and it is really really amazing.

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Also there are some other eye catching ones.

Gloji Light Bulb Bottle

In originally designed light bulb shaped bottle, Gloji drink is all about energy, antioxidants and balanced health. Interesting package makes this product different from other drinks on the market.

Nike Stadium Packaging

Limited number of Nike shoeboxes were transformed to house a stadium within by inserting a printed sheet of the stadium interior with embedded sound chips. So you could hear the crowd go wild when the box was opened.

More could be found here: http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/04/04/20-unusual-and-creative-packaging-designs/

With the increase in people’s disposable income, creative packaging design is playing a more and more important role nowadays when customers make their purchasing decisions on non-essential products. The more creative the packaging are, the more attractive the products would be and the more desire and willingness customers would have to impulse them to make the purchase. And that is exactly the second step of promotion: getting the interest from customers. It is also a critical step to convert customers’ feeling “I like it” to “I want it” as we discussed  in class about the AIDA model.

Creative Packaging also develops a positive and fresh image of the company. Customers would unconsciously get imprinted the idea that this company is trying their best to keep up with the ongoing trend and update their  products to add variations to the market. We like surprise and interesting products and creative packaging could be a really good tool in assisting promotions but never try to overdo.

Categories
Internal Link Marketing

“Made-for-China” era is approaching

The posting – “Made in china vs. Made for China” – of my friend Meng caught up my attention few days ago. As she mentioned in her posting, everyone is sort of getting used to see “made in China” on the label of the stuff we purchase, but what excites me is the coming “Made for China” era.

Agreeing with Meng’s opinion, foreign companies put their efforts more on getting Chinese customers know about their products rather than tailoring their products to the Chinese culture in the past few decades, but nowadays, more and more companies are “wooing Chinese consumers by designing products for them”. As mentioned in the article “From Made in China to Made for China” on Harvard Business Review, lots of “Made for China companies” are emerging:” In September 2010, France’s Hermes opened its first Shang Xia — which translates roughly as “from top to bottom” — store in Shanghai to mark the launch of a line of ready-to-wear clothing and crafts inspired by traditional Chinese motifs. In August 2010, America’s Levi Strauss launched, with much fanfare, a global jeans brand, dENiZEN, in the same city.” Additionally, some of the foreign companies that have been operating in China for a long time has created their impression that they are Chinese and Danone is a great example. Those companies “realize that developing local products and brands lets newcomers bypass the long and cumbersome process of introducing existing products from home markets and then, incrementally tailoring them to the needs of Chinese consumers” which the foreign countries are either comfortable with or capable of.

I believe that it’s good for foreign companies to share Chinese market as it can always bring up the competition and drive up the speed of products renovation. However, what deserves more attention is that our home-made brand could also learn from them, with home advantages, we are supposed to have better performance and gain stronger brand loyalty base as we know our culture better than anyone else. Moreover, our home-made brand could also try breaking into other countries markets and tailoring our products to other countries’ culture and see what we could gain. Larger market would bring us more profits and also help firm the trust we’ve already build up within home country.

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