What did you learn about your team, yourself and marketing? 

Working with my team, I felt that every one of us were responsible, hardworking, and just perfect. From recent team projects, I was already worn out by free-riders and negative arguments within my past groups. Yet, with this group I had the best experience of doing a group project. I also learned about myself that I love marketing and perhaps will choose marketing as my major, since I had great fun in this class. Not only from this project, but also from the whole course, I learned so much about marketing that my thoughts on marketing prior to taking this course is now completely gone and replaced with fresh new knowledge and creative ideas to continue studying about this field.

What skills did you enhance or develop, if any? 

I was able to enhance my skills of cooperating with team members and supporting them. I also was able to develop skills for speaking out to initiate different ideas and discussions, which were the skills I wanted to strengthen more.

What would you do differently next time? 

I would pay more attention to the editing part of the finished copy of the assignment, since our group was taken marks off for a few mistakes on that. Also, I want to enhance my video making skills to ensure that I have fun time with similar projects and be able to add more complex effects in the video.

What are you top takeaways? 

My top takeaways are learning how to come up with new marketing strategies by taking what a company has currently and developing more upon it. Despite the company we chose had some negative parts in current situations, they were not just somethings to throw away. We creatively used those to enhance the strengths of the company and twist them to offer a new approach to succeed.

Target launched off its first new stores in Canada this month. As expected, Target is experiencing heavy demand from new Canadian consumers who are curious and eager to visit the newly opened Target stores. One of the customers who visited the newly opened store says, “80% of the racks were empty and hooks in the change rooms were already ripped out of the wall”(Shaw). Continuing its successful marketing strategy prior to opening, as Tracy summarized in her blog’s post “Target Meets Canada”, Target used product placement as one of its promotional strategy at its opening event in Toronto, by inviting famous celebrities to the launch party and have them say “I love Target!”. See video.

Also, in addition, Target went hand-in-hand with Roots, the beloved clothing brand of Canada, to initiate a cross-promotional strategy to further reach into the Canadian consumers. With Root’s already existing brand value, especially favoured by those with patriotism and preference towards national products, Target will certainly gain potential to compete against its rivals, such as Walmart and The Bay.

From its beginning, Target prepared for its launching in Canada with great effort and energy by conducting extensive market researches on Canadian market and having pre-opening promotional strategies, such as pervasive marketing. Even post-opening and also for its future new openings throughout Canada, Target is armed with perfect gears to win the hearts of Canadian consumers. There is only excitement left for Target’s future parade down the streets of Canada.

Sources:

Shaw, Hollie. “‘We definitely were slammed’: Target hoping new store openings will ease inventory issues”. Financial Post. Retrieved from <http://business.financialpost.com/2013/03/18/we-definitely-were-slammed-target-hoping-new-store-openings-will-ease-inventory-issues/>.