Welcome to my COMM 296 – Marketing Blog!

In an article from Trendwatching.com entitled, “Flawsome: Why brands that behave more humanly, including showing their flaws, will be awesome”, the writer focused on ideas as to why brands who are more personal are becoming more appealing to and gaining more loyal clients. Brands that possess traits such as being honest or transparent, being open to communication, being caring and most importantly being apologetic when mistakes are made, are able to make genuine connections with their clients. This ties to the fact that with numerous amounts of brands present within every industry and every spending bracket, there is a need for companies to find a way to develop loyalty.

Taken from Trendwatching.com from article "Flawsome"

This article simply made me aware of what I already have been doing, which is advocating the brands that have people who actually provide support and reach out to render better services or products to me. So it made me think of this example, for instance you are looking for a potential replacement for a position within your company, and you set minimum requirements for the “hard skills” that are needed and make sure that everyone who applies meets all these requirements before they move on to the interview with you. That being said, how else would you then differentiate/select the “one” candidate from the others?  I would look for the candidate that possesses attributes that match/benefit me or my company, and I’m guessing you would do the same. Keeping that in mind, then in choosing brands, it would make most sense or be natural for us to choose brands that we find common ground with. Don’t get me wrong quality and design play integral roles in our decision making, but with the myriad  of products available, in our eyes the playing field for these brands are relatively equal.

Taken from The Drum Modern Marketing & Media UK

Just like the article stated, as consumers, we’re not looking for the perfect brand, because we know that   does not exist and we often have negative reactions to people/brands that look at themselves as perfect. We’re simply looking for the brand that knows how to be a “friend”, knows how to reciprocate, communicate and most importantly knows how to generate added value. The bottom-line is, company or brand values and their alignment with consumer values are very significant. In this day and age, most brands already meet the “standards” that we [consumers] have set for their products and we expect nothing less, it’s the subtleties and intricacies involved in being able to develop genuine “relationships” with clients that actually make certain brands stand out.

I’m writing this in response to Dan Neufeld’s blog post about Heinz’s decision to produce a line of coloured ketchup. In his blog post, he highlighted reasons as to why this product line failed to succeed in the long run. I agree with all the reasons he posted, as well as the points highlighted by the blog he [Dan] wrote the post on, which is from Fastcompany. Dan covered the points as to why this product did not succeed. These points being that the marketing done by Heinz targeted the wrong audience, Heinz overestimated the life span of the product, and Heinz changed something that was already fundamentally attributed to its product; ketchup is red.

To supplement Dan’s post, I’ll be talking about two specific product that involve odd colours that did succeed, and I’ll be giving one fundamental reason as to why I think they did.

Taken from GTS Static

Taken from Mouse Planet

Doritos 3D: Monster Colorz – changes the colour of your tongue to blue as oppose to the normal orange [cheese]

Dark Vador Burger – burgers on a pair of dyed black buns

I believe that these two products succeeded, because of the fact that their producers recognized the products’ purpose. They recognized that these are NOVELTY products. Meaning, the main purpose of these products were to drive up interest in the main products, normal Doritos and normal burgers from Quick. They were both released for a limited time, in limited quantities, and they were tied up with blockbuster hits. They both stirred up their own buzzes, the Dark Vador burger was featured in multiple blogs and even in CNN, while Doritos 3D was well promoted by Frito-Lays.

The bottom line is that, branding and positioning are important. Important enough to the point where it can be argued that making the wrong decisions on either of these aspects guarantee product failure. The producers of these products did not try and push the product line [abrupt repositioning] like Heinz did, because they knew that the product life of these novelties were short and interest in them would most certainly die down. They were basically edible marketing campaigns, and they served their purpose.

I decided to do something interesting for this blogpost, interesting for myself at least. I decided to just choose a random blog from someone in class [through to Comm296 Section blog list], because I figured that writing about something I may know nothing about could be interesting. I ended up clicking and reading Michelle Holmes’ blog about “Guerilla Marketing”, and that’s what I’ll be talking about for the rest of this post.

As soon as the pictures in the post loaded, I realized that she’d be talking about something I was actually interested in. After reading through the whole entry, I have to say that agree with her insights and support her ideas. I used the word “have”, because just like her, I do feel like plain video or audio ads are starting to get predictable, repetitive, irritating to borderline unbearable. There are very few ads online that stop me from pressing the “Skip this Ad” button. In Michelle’s blog, she introduced another site called Designer-Daily that highlighted some ad campaigns that were very unique and interesting. These were things I’d actually stop and stare at, in other words, these ads were and could still possibly be effective.

Towards the end, Michelle mentioned that these ad campaigns are testament to the constant innovation and invention present and needed not just in ad production, but marketing in general. This ties to the point stated above, the fact that people are getting sick and tired of normal ad campaigns puts increasing amounts of pressure on companies to find ways to better market their product. Even if there are a number of potential clients out there, they will have no value unless they [clients] know of the presence of their [sellers] products. Also, just as the number of buyers are increasing, the competition present multiplies and the grind between each entity intensifies.

It may sound cliché, but in the end change [in marketing] will really be the only thing that remains constant. Who knows, maybe one day these “Guerilla Marketing” campaigns will be the type of things that people will be rambling and complaining about.

I came across this article written by Richard Branson about branding, specifically applying his definition and approach of this in the operations and expansion of Virgin. I figured it would be a good starting topic for my blog. I am not entirely sure how many of you [readers] have flown with Virgin Airlines before, but for those who have not, I am encouraging you to do so. Take note, I have no vested interest in the company, aside from the fact that I have been struck by the Virgin ‘experience’. As Richard Branson points out towards the end of the article, that is what the company is all about and that is what they are marketing, the unique experience.

Virgin has developed its image to be fairly transparent and most definitely fun. This is what they stick to in their ads and promotions; focusing on the idea that they deliver high-quality service at the most reasonable price possible. More often than not, they do deliver, and that’s what keeps their clients loyal. The company is aware that they are in a fairly competitive playground where are lot of the players are in similar if not equal footing, which is why the highlight of their ads tend to be in the subtle things that they provide that others do not [in-flight chair massagers]. Also, Virgin’s ability to use the transparency of their company as a marketing tool has also given them a significant advantage in my opinion, sharing the ups and the downs and sometimes using witty advertising puts them in line with any other person. In the end though, I still believe that Virgin’s main marketing tool is their CEO, Richard Branson, he will do anything to put the Virgin brand in the minds of people, be it kite-surf in England or boat across the Atlantic; not to mention his ability to speak and use the right words in interviews when asked about Virgin is already great marketing in itself.

Virgin Airlines Interior taken from Inquistr.com