Immersion in Marketing

For my last blog posting, I want to go over some hilarious yet effective outdoor advertising campaigns. The following are pictures of random unconventional product placement in advertisements that catch consumers eyes:

This ad is very visual and easy to see for the consumer. There is no doubt what they are trying to convey.

Attack ads are created all the time and not just in politics. Can you guess who they are trying to dissassociate with?

Interesting place to put an ad. Not only is it funny and eye catching, this form of advertising gets carried around for free.

This ad is slightly harder to understand if you are not familiar with motorcycles or don't see the brand name. Target market is a select few enthusiasts towards motorcycles.

Clearly this ad is not about how Axe will change your smell but how it changes your lifestyle as well. Could create lashback from people who find this inappropriate.

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Radio stations tend to have lower advertising bugets for outdoor ads so this is a very cost effective and interesting way to advertise their brand.

Companies can go wild regarding these outdoor advertising campaigns and I know that I remember brand names that leave an impact for me. All of these are awesome and effective ways to convey what companies want consumers to know. However, Lauren Nipp brought up some interesting points about her blog post regarding outdoor advertising: These ads can be very effective if the consumer understands what you are trying to convey. Some of these ads rely on your past experience with the brand or what type of product they sell. Others have social and cultural innuendos that may not come across well to those who are ESL. Marketers have to be very caredful when creating outdoor ads, ensuring that they are targeting the right market for the company.

You know the old saying “if you can’t beat em, join em”? Well it is over used and overrated but oddly fitting for the current deal between paramount and bittorrent. Yes you heard correctly; the multiple billion dollar movie studio and the multiple million user peer to peer download companies are making a deal for the new movie “The Tunnel”. I am not sure if this would be treated as cobranding in this situation but it is definitely intriguing.

Marketers for the movie and music industry have been challenged by the current accessibility of stolen media over the Internet. Consumers love convenience; naturally it is much easier AND cheaper to download your movies at home in your underwear than going to the movie rental store. ITunes has been at the forefront of combatting this through marketing themselves as convenient and accessible, parallel to torrent networks.

Anyways, paramount is planning to release a specific version on the bittorrent peer to peer network where you will be able to download it free and legally! Imagine that! They plan to create a DVD version with alternate endings and bonus material that is not available on the torrent version. Their stance is “if we stop fighting the peer to peer net works, they could become the biggest revolution we have ever seen in the way we share entertainment and information.” I foresee the entire music and movie content industry shifting focus and marketing towards a cloud distribution system. This will be a HUGE change and move all of these massive companies brand images to a new realm. The next 10 years are going to be a very interesting time for these marketers and marketing tactics!

In recent history, Dove (the large cosmetics company) has attempted to brand itself toward true beauty. They have released ad campaigns which portray less unrealistic super model appearances. There was a viral video released in 2006 called Dove Evolution (Above) that sparked huge stir in the way we perceive beauty ads. The video begins with an average employee working for Dove; they take her from what we regard as average looks to modeling cosmetics on a billboard.

The most recent ad campaign called “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (Below) is designed to increase donation and awareness to their “Self-Esteem Fund”. This fund was made to “help free the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes”. Dove is one of the only beauty and cosmetics companies that are genuinely concerned and actively protesting against unrealistic images of beauty that we are influenced by every day.

By creating these campaigns, they increase their following and attract a segment of consumers that are concerned with beauty but at the same time know they will not look like super models. Dove walks a fine line when making these advertisements because like it or not, they still sell a beauty product. I will leave it up to you to decide if Dove is truly helping the community or if they are simply fishing to satisfy our conceded perception of westernized beauty.

This week I want to touch on the pricing strategies of three different products within different consumer markets. I cannot get over the fact that one marketing strategy for a given company can be entirely different than for another. It really truly is an art; allow me to elaborate.

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For a product in the mature stage, there are limited strategies towards what you are able to do as a company. It takes huge capital investment to enter a market like this and there is lots of competition within trying to defend themselves. An example of a company that attempted to increase market share is Dell within the PC market in 2001. Dell was the #2 computer maker worldwide and #1 in the United States at that time but they had to realise the apparent threats within the market. Round Rock (a Texas based tech company) was attempting to gain massive amounts of market share by slashing prices. Dell replied in kind by reducing their own prices in the short term, increasing their market share by stealing it from others. Margins were a lot lower for the company in their quarterly return thereafter, however in the long term they gained valuable consumers in a market with a steady and unchanging demand.

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Similar to that pricing tactic but for different reasons, the iPad was priced very aggressively when it was first put into the market. At $499, you could have the newest apple product and have a very sleek multi-tool. This differs from the Dell example because Apple practically established the tablet market. There was not very much competition and they priced very low in order to attract many first time users and keep them as loyal customers. The market is currently in the development stage but new entrants have to create a product around what the iPad has developed in order to meet consumer preferences.

Both of these strategies are similar, however they arose from very different circumstances. This is just another interesting observation within the world of marketing that shows how creative and original you must me to remain competitively advantageous.

Companies today are plentiful and once they reach the mature stage, it is about stealing market share or entering a new market all together. Brand extensions occur all the time (a good example would be the rumoured Angry Birds lunch boxes). Although most brand extensions are well thought out and effective, there are some that seem to come out of left field. They are either so completely different that they are not recognised under the same brand name or they are just not necessary for the world to consume. Here are some great examples of brand extensions gone wrong:

a) Cheetos Lip-Balm

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Need I say more than that? Cheetos co-branded with Lotta Luv LLC to create a Cheetos cheese tasting lip balm for the quirky consumer. Why would people need or want the feeling of cheese on their lips for the next 20 minutes, causing them to become chapped due to persistent licking? There was a lack of quality involved with the taste and the look of the product, creating a hugely unsuccessful product extension. This is like putting yoghurt and coke, two delicious products, together in a tube and smearing it on your face. Not ideal.

b) Bic: Disposable Underwear


Are you a female that likes to use lots of sharp stationary objects and needs disposable underwear? Bic tried to leverage their disposability and massive retail availability of their brand to introduce female disposable underwear. This is a case of incorrect brand referral for the consumer. I can’t say for you but when I think of Bic, soft one time use undergarments do not come to mind. Consumers did not associate this brand with their new product because it was too far away from what Bic typically sells. Brand extensions are useful and successful if it can back up your core brand image while entering a new or slightly different market. This is clearly not the case here.

Whether it is in the field of high tech or consulting, I aspire to one day take a chunk of some market share for myself. Standard competitive markets nowadays can be treated like a pie; each different competitor takes a slice until there is no more left. In the case of the iPad, it should be treated more like a hungry kid that devours the entire pastry and leaves the crumbs for the Android.

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 Currently, analysts have discovered that the iPad has taken up 95.5 percent of the market share for tablets, leaving the rest to the small competitive firms. Apple has delved into a section of the market that was still in the pre-introductory stage and placed a strongly branded product into the mix. They are once again acting like a monopoly, introducing the product and owning the large majority of the market for it. Only now, we are seeing other competitors realising that the estimated $1 billion industry should not be hogged only by Apple. I am seeing more and more promotions and introductions of new tablet products, shifting the tablet market out of the introductory stage and to the growing stage.

What is a tablet?

Tablets are misunderstood by many but they offer a mix between a laptop and portable media device. You can type notes, surf the net, and enjoy the benefits of applications within large app stores (such as Apple’s). The demand for tablets going to continue to grow for users are now able to play games and do online banking (to see some interesting problems that arise with these portable apps see Lauren Nip’s blog). The question now is: will the iPad 2 take the same amount of market share now that the stages have changed?

In my post this week, I wanted to delve into the unfortunate marketing choices made by some of the biggest companies in the world. Through my study in marketing, I am being taught good practice and proper technique for business success however even the best trained marketers make poor choices.

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Firstly, I am going to talk about McDonalds banner ad, nicknamed “I’d hit it.” If you haven’t heard of it, McDonalds Company considers itself lucky; quite the opposite of what a typical marketing campaign goes for. As you can see from the image above, the wording on the banners are quite misleading and can be offensive. You can tell that MacDonald’s is trying to target those with lower income who already know the brand; however it pertains to something else quite offensive. The ad was taken down 30 minutes after it was released onto the web, claiming that they misunderstood the meaning of the language. I personally don’t know how that got through the marketing chain of command.

The second marketing disaster took place during a live demonstration of the new windows 7 speech recognition tool (Video above). There is a risk that comes along with a live demo, that being the fact that a malfunction makes your product look horrible to the audience. However the reward is high if the product performs well, creating a marketing buzz and the audience becomes advocates for your company. You would have thought that Microsoft would have learned their lesson on live demos after this stunt gone wrong, but no they did not. Even though this was a humorous screw up, Microsoft suffered a loss in popularity due to this failed marketing ploy. Clearly they did not test the speech recognition with a crowd of people in the room again pertaining to the fact that even the best marketers are not perfect.

I realize that many other people (including my fellow peers in my marketing class) have and will be speaking a lot about Facebook. I however am not choosing to write about this multi-billion dollar website because I think it will be an easy topic. In fact, I want to convey just how the Facebook brand has epically changed our personal and professional lives.

Facebook Facts 2010

Starting in 2003, one man (Mark Zuckerberg) decided it would be awesome to hack the Harvard secure network and create a small social media site isolated around the local private dormitories. The rest of the story is pretty straight forward and if you want to know more, go see the social network. Facebook originally branded themselves on the cutting edge of social media, attempting to ride the upward trend toward ownership of personal computers and internet connectivity. Within a very short period of time, they had over 1 million users and rising, making Facebook management contemplate on the direction of the brand. Due to the extreme popularity of Facebook and the return click back rate of the population, the Facebook administration created a sense of necessity for Facebook making it a platform for personal connections, games, businesses, charities and the list goes on.

Facebook is a completely unique entity of its own and we do not have many marketing models to truly recognize the scope of Facebook. For example, it acts like a monopoly for their competitors are meager in comparison so it has relatively little competition. Additionally, Facebook has created its own currency so it has created its own economic factors. Basically, Facebook is no longer a choice for many people and businesses; it is a way to maintain a competitive advantage over your friends or competitors. It has become a complete necessity, much like eating and sleeping for over 500 000 000 people. We are no longer dealing with a company or a marketable brand; it should be treated more like an addiction.

Facebook Connections Visualization

I read on Mashable.com today about Apple’s new registered patents of 2010. Some of them are very intriguing, however I think one of these patents can open a relatively untouched domain of the market and help maintain their competitive advantage. This can be done through the aid of very small solar cells to harness the power of the sun to charge your Apple device. This is done by placing the cells under the touch screen in order to convert the sunlight into battery power for your device. I personally own an Apple iPhone and I have to charge it once a day in order to keep up with my power needs. This simple technology would allow people like me to use my device a lot more and in an environmentally friendly way, creating a large niche in the gadget market.

Apple Solar Cell Patent

Apple has been criticized at times for their lack of responsibility toward the environment which spurred them to produce Macbook pro’s with recycled material. They can further market themselves towards the growing popularity of environmentally friendly companies using this existing solar technology. No extra money is needed to develop or design new technology and people will enjoy the novelty of owning a solar powered Apple device. Being able to shift those already using apple devices toward more environmental options is one thing but doing this would open up a larger target market to those who actively look for green products. This opportunity is obviously evident to Steve Jobs and his associates due to them patenting this idea and I expect to see some fantastic buzz about this in the future.

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