Month: November 2010

Facebook the website that is so popular it has its own movie.  The website that is so popular that it has surpassed Google in time spent on its website.  A website so popular that it has people from every walk of life on it communicating on a daily basis.

Its the popular kid on the block, more like the king on the block, it just lacks one key element outside marketers salivate over; the ability to effectively advertise on its site.  That is the argument at least by digital inspiration, claiming only 18 people clicked on the ad out of a total of 350,000 impressions. Surprisingly enough this wasn’t way back in the beginning of Facebook but rather in July of this year itself.

On the other end of the stick Ian Fernando believes Facebook to be very profitable. You can read about it by clicking on the blue link and make your own opinions.

Was the Ad campaign that only got 18 clicks just a flop or is Facebook actually a bad place to market???

The friendly confines of the yellow pages used to be a marketer’s dream.  Before the internet became accessible to everyone, the only way to find out about what services and products are available in your vicinty was through the yellow pages.

People would flip through them searching for their desired service while stumblind upon ads of other products not in their current evoked set and ads that are directly related to their needs.  Marketing couldnt have been easier with yellow pages, especially considering that everyone had one.

Now a days thought that is not the case as yellow pages are going into remission and have been taken over by the prowness of the internet.  Currently in the US several cities have stopped printing and sending out yellow pages to every house.  Canada is following this pattern as campaigns pressing the yellow pages to quit sending books is making headway.

Black Friday is the favorite “holiday” for shop-a-holics.

It brings about great sales, promotions, and deals that just can’t be passed up on.  It also brings about swarms of people by the thousands which the merchants hope to claim as loyal customers.  According to Black Friday promotional schemes by merchants to draw in customers have been unveiled since Nov 7 of this year, starting off with Macy’s.  Target followed suit shortly after revealing theirs on Nov 9, which broadcasts an array of promotions such as but not limited to:

$3 appliances, most electronics at 50% off, Winter clothing for children at $5, and gift cards given out on top of that for some purchases

It used to be that most companies would hold off on revealing their promotions till a week or so before Black Friday actually occured.  This is not the case anymore.

A reason for this deals with consumers retrieval sets.  The more you are able to advertise directly to a consumer instead of hiding in secrecy, the greater your chances of tapping into that consumer’s retrieval set are.  By tapping into the consumer’s retrieval set and staying their for a long lapse of time (3 weeks currently instead of the previous 1 week) the greater the chance that your company will become the evoked set and hopefully the purchased brand.  By increasing your chances to be the purchased brand through an extra week of advertising your chances of gaining a new loyal customer skyrockets exponentially.

While customer loyalty isn’t recognized in the purchase phase but the post-purchase phase, in order to get to the post-purchase phase you must have consumers enter your store and purchase.  This is exactly what the Black Friday advertisements our aiming for.

Thus, the science of marketing is the key to understanding why Black Friday promotional schemes are being revealed earlier.

We all have our own learning styles whether it be reading the textbook, going to class, sleeping with the textbook in front of us hoping for osmosis to occur or a combination of all three.  Aside from that we also have our individual strengths and weaknesses.

A marketing student tends to be strong in business knowledge, creativity, and visualizing the next great thing before it becomes great.

What happens though if your life though revolves around equations such as F=MA (Newton’s Second Law of Motion), and your business aptitude is relatively low?  Well chances are marketing probably isn’t your major of choice but nuclearphysics might be, or is it?

TED talks shows us an insightful way how Marketing can be explained through the medium of physics allowing all the Science lovers out there to understand Marketing in a simple and comparitible way.