Working with my team composed of Shane, Hilary, Winnie, and Hannah for the marketing mix assignment has been wonderful. While the objective of the project was to apply the marketing concepts learned in class to a specific company, which was SunRype in our case, I was able to learn how different people were suited for different roles in marketing.

I had always thought that marketing was just for the creative individuals who didn’t want to perform quantitative analysis. However, in the initial stages of the project, it became apparent that Shane and I, the two most quantitative members of the team, had a huge undertaking researching numerical figures to perform a situational analysis in the juice industry.

Part two and three of the assignment were dominated by Hilary, Winnie, and Hannah who were able to come up with creative ideas to encapsulate information provided by the situational analysis.

I had no idea that the project would be so difficult due to the fact that the most difficult aspect of marketing wasn’t the research or the creation of ideas, but trying to combine the two aspects into one.

It was apparent to me that only focusing on the numbers and research was inhibiting me from understanding the holistic scope of the project. So, I participated in some of the creative processes and actually took part in creating the story board (using design techniques). I was then able to understand the apprehension my fellow teammates felt in implementing some of the ideas Shane and I had come up with during the research process. They were simply implausible to implement as the artistic rendition of the research would’ve been too complicated to physically create.

So, everyone worked together in the end to find the most prevalent issues that could be accurately presented on the story board. This allowed me to understand that marketing is the perfect fusion of quantitative analysis and the creative process.

Thank you for a great year Tamar!

A natural progression from the passive forms of promotions like commercials and billboards would be a more interactive medium to communicate a company’s products.

With the advent of smartphones and readily accessible computers, gamification is now going to be used for over 70% of the world’s top 2000 companies by 2014. The way that a company can now interactively market is slowly changing the marketing landscape.

Social Networks like Foursquare utilize gamification in order to reward customers who frequent registered establishments. The more you go to your favorite restaurant, the more you are rewarded with titles such as “mayor of xxx restaurant ” This type of social status reward can illicit competition between customers to increase the number of times a person will visit a restaurant.

Many companies like Marriott now utilize gamification in order to recruit potential employees. Marriott has its own game on Facebook that allows a player to manage a hotel restaurant. It allows users to get acquainted with the hotel industry while appealing to the Millennial demographic that many companies are now looking to recruit.

Gamification increases how much attention we pay to advertisements, which is especially important in the time poor society of ours with so much noise that has the potential to block out the marketer’s message.

If you doubt gamification can be effective, consider this: most Sauder classes have an iClicker system in place which assigns students points for getting the correct answers.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you pay attention so much when Tamar tells you to get your iClickers out!

This is a blog response to Catherine Caverly’s Ambush Marketing: Clever Or Unethical.

The debate presented in Catherine’s blog post is essentially, is it ethical for Nike to ambush market major sporting events where it isn’t the official sponsor?

While I don’t think Nike is being completely ethical, I still feel as though that ambush marketing isn’t unethical. Ambush marketing is a creative way of circumventing certain limitations that inhibit the company from marketing its products. It’s kind of like using tax accountants to reduce your taxes. If I make a lot of money and I use tax accountants to find loop holes to reduce my income tax, is that unethical?

Furthermore, Adidas and most of the grand sporting events are not vulnerable entities. The fact that the World Cup received $100,000,000 from Adidas to be its official sponsor means that both organizations have a great amount of capital to sustain and protect their corporations. Ambush marketing isn’t like McDonalds preying on the fat or lingerie for young girls, it’s a strategy employed by Nike designed to defeat Adidas.

Nike utilized ambush marketing to save a huge sponsorship cost while still advertising its own products. Nothing is stopping Adidas from being the official sponsor and also utilizing interesting online videos to inspire the average person to support athletics.

Ethics has always been a grey area, but my response to Catherine’s blog is that I believe ambush marketing is extremely clever,

The dream of becoming a Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) champion was a goal that only the elite male fighters of the world could dream of.

This all changed on February 23^rd as the first female UFC Bantamweight (135lb) Champion Ronda Rousey (on the left) defended her belt against her challenger, Liz Carmouche (on the right).

The established method of marketing was modified to showcase the new female division’s main event. Instead of the usual montages of workouts interlaced by trash talk,

the UFC built a prime-time preview show which showcased the more emotional side of fighting.

The preview showcased Rousey’s sterling yet horribly unfair career. Even though she was the first American woman ever to win a bronze medal in the Olympics for Judo, she was relegated to being a waitress after the end of her decorated career. Liz Carmouche had had to hide her true self from her fellow marines due to the fact that she served during a time when the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was in place.

The preview made the male viewer respect the plight of women in men’s world at the same time giving female viewers new role models to look up to. The editing of the video and the inspiring personal stories allowed female fighters to be considered on the same level of toughness and skill levels as the men while still being able to maintain their femininity.

The UFC’s marketing techniques essentially took an existing product line (the fighting events) and added depth by introducing women into the fight cards and garnered a new demographic of women viewers while not alienating their existing demographic of males aged from 18-35. Had the promotions been handled inappropriately, many male viewers may have considered the first female championship bout as a “cat fight” instead of the battle that it was.

The fight was a massive success from a marketing perspective as many major outlets (ESPN magazine, CNN, etc) who had never covered UFC events tuned in to watch the first and surely not the last women’s MMA fight.

A few years ago, the South Korean grocery outlet Homeplus was the second largest grocery retailer in Korea. Trailing behind E-Mart, the largest grocery retailer in Korea, Homeplus could not close the gap between itself and its chief rival through conventional means chiefly due to the fact that E-Mart’s grocery outlets outnumbered Homeplus stores 7:5.

So, Homeplus decided to launch a new advertising campaign that focuses on two specific components of the marketing mix: place and promotion.

Homeplus initiated an unconventional advertising campaign at subway stations, posting pictures of store items on the walls and labeling each item with QR codes. Customers could literally get all of their grocery shopping done by using their smartphones to scan the QR codes of items they wanted and these grocery store items would be delivered to the homes of customers.

Homeplus was able to target new substantial locations with this promotion. Korean subway stations are jam packed with busy people who often tend to be both professionals or school students who do not have the time to go to a grocery store to shop. This advertising campaign targeted these individuals and increased the brand’s online presence to the status of the leader in online grocery shopping.

By creating this innovative promotion, Homeplus didn’t even have to invest in physical stores to create more locations. Costs were kept to a minimum.

The use QR codes also provides the company with a source of data. The shopping data of each customer is linked to his or her account on Homeplus’ website. This allows another avenue of place in the marketing mix as Homeplus also utilizes data mining to find out purchasing patterns of certain customers and uses the information to alert consumers on saving opportunities.

Homeplus’ innovative marketing tactics have really efficiently utilized many aspects of marketing, especially places and promotion.

Eric Kelly was a four time national boxing champion with aspirations of a grand career in professional boxing until a street fight gone wrong took his dreams away from him. He now operates Church Street Gym in New York which has become the most popular gym for Wall Street investment bankers thanks to a viral video published by Kelly.  

The ethical dilemma that I wish to talk about today is: is it ethical from a marketing perspective to sell to an audience that one has publicly denounced?

I won’t be able to supply a definitive yes or no answer as marketing is a subject of gray areas.

As you can see in the embed video, Eric Kelly carries a great deal of disdain for the New York Wall Street types that enter his gym everyday. This isn’t just a media play by Mr. Kelly either as evident in this article by sbnation (a sports blog). 

Kelly’s brand has become infamously synonymous with the image that portrays “an angry black man insulting rich, nerds.” Oddly enough, it is the very people who Kelly ridicules who continue to supply his business with money.

This is due to the fact that an exchange is taking place between Kelly and the bankers that satisfies the core principle of marketing. Kelly has created something of value to the bankers which is a honest, truthful examination of who they are as human being when they are in front of another man ready to fight, not in front of a computer trading stocks.

It’s Kelly’s ability to humorously and honestly deprecate the investment bankers who may not deal with such a raw environment in their day jobs that has satisfied the customer’s needs and wants. It may or may not be ethical, but at the end of the day, the bankers are willingly subjecting themselves to Mr. Kelly’s services fully knowing what will happen to them because they are happy with the gym.