Junie Chow's Blog

Many companies choose to rely on celebrity influence to aid in marketing their products or services. It is especially useful when that celebrity is a major trendsetter and has a large fanbase.

This leads to a CNN video about the Korean market for cell phones that I saw a while back while surfing on the kpop blogging site, Allkpop.com (http://www.allkpop.com/2009/10/big_bang_and_2ne1_on_cnn). It features mainly two big cell phone giants, LG and Samsung, which were dominating the Korean market at the time the video was posted. The video stated that two most popular phone models in Korea from these two companies were the “Samsung Haptic” and the “LG Lollipop”, due to heavy marketing efforts with very famous celebrities in Korea.

For example, LG promoted its “Lollipop” model with a very colourful music video featuring Korean boy group “Big Bang” and the yet-to-debut Korean girl group “2NE1”. At the time “Big Bang” had become a national idol group with thousands of loyal Korean fans as well as thousands of international fans. On the other hand, “2NE1” was relatively unknown which roused a natural interest regarding the group. This growing interest for the new “2NE1” group, along with the catchy tune of the music video and the influential trend-setting powers of “Big Bang”, no doubt contributed to the success and popularity of “Lollipop” phone. Also, the cell phone market in Korea is predominately led by teenagers and young adults, and the decision to use “Big Bang” and “2NE1” in the phone promotions is because of the singers’ appeal to these target groups. In general, people just want to be like their beloved idols.

Due to the overwhelming success of the “LG Lollipop” phone and the “Lollipop” music video, Big Bang returned again to promote the “Lollipop 2” phone.

CNN Video

“Lollipop” Music Video

This week I read Felicia Firdaus’ blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/ffirdaus/), about Walmart’s new “Geo Girls” cosmetics line for tween girls between the ages of 8-12 years old. This is not something new as there has been make up products available to tweens before, such as the “Stuff by Duff” line by Hilary Duff.

Image from perfumezilla.com

Felicia brings up a good point/issue regarding the appropriateness of selling the “Geo Girls” line, or make up in general, to such a young audience.

I agree with her statements on the implications and problems that arise from selling the product to young girls. Certainly there are many media influences that young girls are especially susceptible to that make them feel not pretty enough and insecure about their looks. There are models in ads who are covered with pounds of makeup and young girls may aspire to become like them and this often leads to girls thinking that “looks” are everything.  These are some reasons why young girls might start using makeup and I’ve noticed in recent years there are a growing number of girls wearing makeup at a very young age.

I find it shocking though for “Geo Girls” to target eight year olds, that’s a third grader!  I believe makeup is something that someone older uses to look younger. So I don’t think there’s much use for an eight year old to look any younger than they already do. I mean how much younger can they get?

What I think is that “Geo Girls” should advertise to the parents and not to the tweens through mediums such as ads on a kids tv channel. It should be the parents who determine whether their tweens should use the product; parents should have the final say in the decision.

I had recently taken a look at a blog by Minwoo Choi, a fellow comm 296 classmate of mine (https://blogs.ubc.ca/immin03/). The newest blog article was about the different kinds of marketing strategies that department stores use and I found it really fascinating. For example a department store would place washrooms on higher levels of the store in order to give customers more chances to see the large selection of products that they’re offering.  Another strategy is to have no windows and clocks, as to keep customers from knowing the time of day and to keep shopping. Reading the different types of strategies on that blog stirred up previous shopping experiences in my mind that backed those claims. I remember shopping at “The Bay” and “Sears” in the past and finding myself having trouble locating a washroom on the first floor or a clock for that matter. As for windows, either there were none or they were tinted black.

I’m also beginning to see other strategies employed by stores, such as situating magazine, candy and chocolate stands near or next to the check-out counters. This makes sense because customers waiting in long lineups not doing much make excellent targets for product marketing. When a customer starts flipping through the pages of a magazine while waiting in line, chances are they will take the magazine with them in the end and buy it. I find this very similar to newspaper stands at bus stops, however instead of waiting to “check-out” people are waiting for the bus.

So I’m thinking back to the concepts that I’ve learned from class, and situational factors come to mind, in particular the “shopping situation”. I would think that these strategies are part of the situational shopping factors as they influence the consumer’s decision process.