Month: November 2010

I found I have addicted in reading several marketing blogs that I spend soooooo much time clicking the links on the sidebar on those blogs. I love especially the advertisements they posted and commented on, and their unique ideas about business that I have never thought of. MUCH much more interesting than reading textbooks. Haha.

Here I wanna share a video, which talks about Small Business Saturday! Big retailers have Black Friday and online merchants have Cyber Monday, now America came out a new idea that urges people to support their local small businesses through Small business Saturday! From now on every Saturday after Thanksgiving will be Small Business Saturday. It indeed will help boosting the local businesses a lot because those are which people often forget when seasonal discounts and promotions come. People always anticipate discounts and rebates from big retailers or fancy brands such as Banana Republic, Apple, GAP, ZARA and so on that small businesses are ignored and left behind. So instead of having most of the money flows to big retailers,  the America starts this campaign to adjust the gap that wealth becomes wealthier and poor becomes poorer. So to create awareness, American Express (the one who started this idea) uses a few promotional strategies to launch this shopping event, including advertising (posted below), PR (business talks on TV, email interview, retailers interview, “like” the “Small Business Saturday” page on Facebook and $1 will be donated Girls Inc., etc.), and personal selling which you will be served when you get into the stores. Sales promotion is provided not only to consumers but also small business owners – whoever sign up for the shopping event will get $100 advertising credit on Facebook! Sounds pretty cool as Facebook has always been the popular site for business to advertise. What about direct marketing? Uhmmmmm… perhaps it has conducted direct communication through electronic media like email to reach people? I’m not sure about this though. =) One thing that I definitely know is that, because small businesses often don’t have enough budget to advertise for their brands, the campaign that generates primary demands will certainly help the local economy as a whole.

Love the slogan: Shop small. It’s gonna be huge =)

*Slogan is sweet, short, reflective and easy to remember!*

http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/innovation/video/small-business-saturday-shop-local

I read an article titled “Why websites suck”. It talks about the huge flaw that websites have is that they are too flashy, graphic-heavy, and complicated to access. The best website, the author suggests, is the one that people manage to finish their top tasks on that particular website in an efficient and simple manner. Top task simply means the main objective that the website serves. For example, Amazon’s top task is to get buyers get what they want without much hassles dealing with the side bars, pop-up windows, flashy images etc. So, if people who want to buy a table, they end up on a page that’s absolutely focuses on table.

A very good claim I learned from the article is this: “Every website failure I’ve come across is the organization wanting the customer to fit around how it’s organized, how it thinks, and the language that it uses. By contrast, great websites organize around the customer. It pays attentions to your needs.”

It is so true not only about web design, but products too. Imagine if a product or service is designed to have customers fitted with its features, versus the one designed to fit around customer’s needs, which will more likely be successful? In a value-driven society nowadays, you will realize customer orientation would be one of the company objectives that cannot be forgotten, because if customers don’t perceive value in your products/services, you will definitely lose in the intense competition. A huge mistake that companies will often have is that they are eager to introduce something incredible that everyone will embrace, something so unique that, they forget to think about how that innovation fits into customers’ needs, and that often leads to failure.

A very good example that the article cites is Apple. It says, Ipod started with focusing on making its top task – playing music – something super easy and simple, and people went crazy with it. While other products that offer complex features don’t work out so well. It’s best to have one top task, maximum 5, anything goes beyond that may start getting confusing.

Another example that I could think of is Ferrari. It makes super fancy and high-end sports vehicles, and only that. It’s never connected with the word “affordable”, yet people are crazily dumping in money just to own it. Its top task, I would say, is to be as expensive as possible! Same applies to Harley Davidson mentioned in our class, which some of its top tasks is to build classic and stylish heavy-weighted motorcycles.

*You may read more about top task on this site: http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/why-websites-suck-guy-kawasaki.

Do you believe that silent language could be more effective in delivering message than verbal language? I do! Look at the ads below:

First look at the socket. It is tacitly understood that the ads is talking about energy (or may be electricity). You may not have idea what it is to do with panda. A decoration? And when you read further down, there’s a WWF label with its recognizable icon – the panda. So audience will immediately read what the ads says: Please help save species through power-saving! So save more power guys if you love panda =) (of course, for other animals’s sake as well)

The advertisement is so easy and simple that it doesn’t include headlines and body text to convey its messages. It attracts audience’s attention with only one simple colour on the background that helps focusing our attention on the image. The branding is linked so well with the image that people can quickly catch up and interpret what’s on the advertisement.

Must we have lots of graphics, colours, motions and texts to create compelling message? Definitely not! Creativity could be as simple and powerful as this.

Creativity not = complexity

I’ve later found some nice print ads with similar themes that I wanna share with you guys:

The washing power is so powerful that even the shadow of the clothes turns white! Although it is obvious that the image has been edited in photoshop, people can instantly know the function of the product: White, White, and White! No other message blends into the ads, so the message can be understood rather quickly.

This is the print ads from The Economists, the magazine that talks mainly about world news, politics, economics and business. Your first glance might not realize that the brain is made up of a number of magazine. Look nearer!! The subtle meaning may take time to comprehend. But I love the “smart” feeling that it gives.

No comment. =) Just brilliant.

Again, this is another ads with subtle details. Don’t get it? Think why McDonalds makes the font so BIG that it cannot be fit into the space!!!!!

For this one, you’ll need a bit of knowledge about cultural buildings. If you realize the reflection is actually a mosque – the Arabic/Islamic central building for worship. It simply means Naber Kaffee is soooooo Arabic!

*Do you observe that the ads above have no single words describing the products, just a big picture with little variation in colours? Those are often my favourites!*

However, there are also some that I think the messages encoded are… not so nice may be?

The slogan is “always keep the content in its original bottle.” The product advertised is Anne Cream, cream hair remover. Got a hint? I actually looked through the and ads slogan a few times, and meditated for a while, then I got the message that perhaps the guy keeps the hair remover cream in other face moisturizing bottle, that he uses it without noticing that. The ads is way too subtle that it makes the message hard to interpret (may be I’m slow). Also, I don’t quite see how it advertises the greatness of the product.

This is “Road” from Nike. Nice colour blended together. But is this an… ads? It may be a picture. I may mistook it as print ads.

My first impression was: What IS THIS! It looks… unappealing to me. I totally didn’t get why there are so many horrible faces on the ads. After I read through the comments posted by others, only I noticed that those are juices spilled out from the desserts. Perhaps the juices should look more like juices??

It’s Mcdonald again!!! But this advertisement does nothing about promoting or talking positively about Mcdonald’s; it targets at Mcdonald’s high-fat and high-calories menu instead.

After watching this ad, I supposed this would impose severe negative impact on Mcdonald’s sales, on burgers particularly, but in fact McDonald sales had gone up!

Wonder why? The adverse effect that the ad had created? Consumers want to be “on their way” earlier? New trend to have burger no matter how unhealthy it is?

No!

The answer is, McDonalds wheeled out a range of alternative to its famous burgers! So its sales had gone up because of the alternatives, not because of the burgers. What a smart act. Perceiving that its sales on burgers is gonna go down, it adopted the strategy of introducing substitutes to burgers. Burgers are unhealthy? Buy others then! Instead of focusing on how to clarify the nutrition that a burger could provide, McDonalds rather gathered its resources on promotional activities on new menu. Why argue? Rolling out the alternatives saved McDonalds not only from economic downturns and the negative impacts that the TV ads could have brought to its sales, but also it made Mcdonald’s financial stats looks so much better, while other firms worrying about the negative figures in their reports. It is a smart decision that kills two birds with one stone. However, introducing new product at this stage poses a great risk to take – firms have to be cautious that consumers will become more price sensitive during economic downtown, so they might not buy new alternative released. As it might have targeted the right market or positioned its products correctly (low-cost happy meals perhaps?), the new release eventually brought a boost in McDonalds’ sales.

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/09/16/10/i-was-lovin-it-television-ad-enrages-mcdonalds

It is often a big headache for marketers to reposition a product or brand like Cheeseburger that has been established in the global market for quite a while and already in its maturity stage. Realizing the trend that people won’t spend additional bucks on fast food, McDonald eventually came out a penetration strategy, telling people that how much they can save on 2 Cheeseburgers and spend what they save on things they desire.

It shifts McDonald’s position further down in low-cost fast food category (being even lower-cost), however I don’t perceive the change of it’s position to even lower price equals lower quality (it isn’t that low, though. The price still somehow captures what consumer’s value on burgers. So charging a bit higher is necessary). In fact, the save-your-money promotional campaign that McDonald now embraces adds great value to its products – It’s fun, and it saves you money! I start wondering how low a Big Mac’s price would be in the future, as McDonald’s keeps lowering the price of its burgers (and size shrinking as well, huh!).

I love the way how it came out the creative promotional idea by wrapping all the stuffs with the Big Mac’s wrap. For people who have watched this video, when they see things are wrapped in Big Mac’s paper, they instantly get the message that, “Look, having Big Mac can save you bucks to get this!” For people who haven’t known the promotional activity, the act must have gotten their attention and people would want to find out what’s happening in McDonald’s!

My beloved Toshiba had bid farewell to me last weekend. I was so sad indeed, that I thought it would be able to be my inspirational partner for another 3 years. It lived a remarkable life that inspired me greatly. I will miss my lappy dearly.=(

Life has to go on though. I cannot immerse myself too long in bereavement. So I spent my weekend on researching my new potential partner. I narrowed down my choices to Macbook Air and Macbook Pro. I recalled my friend Chang Jie has posted comments about Macbook Air (Tamar showed that in class). After reading through his comments I somehow disagree with a few points. Firstly, I find it very inconvenient to have only one USB port. After plugging in mouse I can’t connect mac air to other electronics like printer. Also, without the driver, it makes life more difficult when installing softwares that come in CD or DVD. Perhaps there are some ways to deal with these problems well, but currently I’m not educated on how to solve these problems, plus it’s time-consuming to do that. I was initially tempted by its beautiful solid design and amazingly small and light body; however as a traditional laptop user, Macbook Air will only be in my evoked set (marketing term!) when I want something fancy, light and highly portable. So in the end, I chose Macbook Pro! Will be receiving my little pretty partner in a few days more. Yipppeee! =)