As we all know, April Fools Day has just gone by. I have to say it’s amazing how companies are willing to do anything to get people’s attention. As they all say, you better do what you love, and I bet it can get really entertaining to form part of a marketing team. This April Fools Day companies came up with several creative jokes!

The reason for this front-running in such a day as well as other big calendar events like Christmas or the famous Superbowl, is to access people by the social media like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, and convey their marketing messages.

Some fun April Fools Day pranks that companies came up with this year:

Procter & Gamble introduces a YouTube video clip on their website, and even twitted about a new variety of Scope mouthwash called Scope Bacon, promoted as the mouthwash “for breath that sizzles.” All I can say is…Ew? I hope it actually IS a prank, for their and our sake. Please watch:

American Eagle Outfitters retail chain, has introduced some line of “Skinny Skinny jeans” for young people, promoted as “our skinniest fit yet.” They made it official by promoting these supposed jeans by models wearing body paint, not pants.

Munchkin is a company that makes products for children and babies, and they announced on Facebook this April fools day, a product named Naughty Mouth soap, which was promoted “to make your point when baby’s language isn’t the cleanest.” I can’t forget to mention, that flavors include “lying liver” and “whining wasabi”.

Last but not least, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors announced scuba diving certification for dogs and cats. This company could actually be serious about it.

Did you fall?

So now you get why I mentioned that “companies are willing to do anything to get people’s attention” and I really do hope all of these ideas actually expired at midnight on April Fools.

I found a really interesting external blog post from HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Blog. It is titled: Pinterest Launches Free Analytics Tool for Business Accounts.

A few months ago, Pinterest blew marketers’ worlds by introducing business accounts. Now, Pinterest has come up with the great idea of introducing an analytic tool for these accounts, “Pinterest Analytics”. This is just amazing!

Simple and easy, it is absolutely free of charge! As long as your account is verified, then you can access it right now. To be verified, this means, that you can’t use your personal account, rather, you must have a business account.

The blog post explains how with Pinterest Analytics tool you can find so much information. What it does is that are a few different tabs that you can select to have access to different metrics. For example, you can find things like:

The daily average number of:

• Pins of people who pin from your website
• Times that each pin was repinned
• Times your pins appeared on Pinterest in the main feed, search results, or on people’s boards.
• People who saw your pins on Pinterest
• Clicks to your website from Pinterest
• People who visited your website from Pinterest

And also options like “most recent”, “most repinned” and “most clicked”.

I think that this tool is such a good way of taking good advantage of the enormous amount of people that are involved in the webpage, and that surf through it everyday. There is tons of information that could be extracted from something that looks so subtle and simple. But reality is, in the end of the spider web, there is someone taking information from every click you make, every image you scroll over

“Style. Delivered Daily.” Rue La La, demanded by the most popular brands, offering them Members-only prices. With their base on a webpage, they offer the best of men and women fashion, kids, travel, home, and many more. They offer daily deals, each lasting 48 hours.

With their base is Boston, Rue La La has expanded enormously specially through New York. They have a clear target market on focus, which is on long-lasting relationships with highly engaged members for innovative brands.

CEO Ben Fischman is working on a huge business based on e-commerce, but the key is very few ads. The company itself has focused on little traditional advertising, as a way of keeping their costs low, but at the same time taking advantage of their strategy by focusing on their target market. “We use minimal advertising for customer acquisition” – Fischman told Business Insider’s Social Commerce Summit. “We rely on word of mouth and viral marketing.”

Rue La La’s CEO is quite focused on keeping the advertising low, and on word of mouth and viral marketing (consists of individual people spreading the word rather than traditional ads; refers to marketing on the Internet). He explained as follows:

“If you’re visiting a city, stay in hotel and ask for a great restaurant, what the concierge tells you it doesn’t hold much credibility. If you’re going to a city and a friend tells you, you write it down and remember. Our membership buys so much and trust so much because the initial introduction wasn’t done through a search ad but through a friend.”

This seems amazing, that a huge company is taking the risk of truly believing they will succeed and meet their expectations with purely the support of customers. In my opinion, this gives them immediate positive values, since they are confident enough to know that the service they offer and their reputation is good enough to leave it to their customers. The company wants long-term customers and their loyalty

“Display ads on Facebook has been effective. I think Facebook advertising, as long as it’s contextually relevant, works.” – Fischman.

http://www.businessinsider.com/rue-la-la-ceo-yes-facebook-ads-work-2013-2#ixzz2K9qN1inX

As probably many of you reading this know, cosmetic treatments have increased its popularity through the past decades. The booming industry today, is having more troubled times than usual, since the existence of doubtful practices that have taken place massively. These cosmetic treatment practices have exploited, hazarded, and put innocent patients’ lives in danger, often being vulnerable as they seek these kinds of treatments for a better appearance.

Under these circumstances, people begin to wonder: what can we do about it? What can patients do about it? What can doctors do about it? What can government do about it? The answer to many of these questions is difficult to find, but as of the last question, government IS trying to do something about it. After the review that was headed by the NHS’s medical director, Sir Bruce Keogh, it was said that Government in fact, has criticized the promotional tactics under this industry as aggressive. They have even mentioned that doctors are not the ones who publish or advise procedures, but salespeople, and that patients are generally abandoned after something in the procedure of their treatment went wrong.

Why did the industry go wrong? Well this is simply because suppliers stopped thinking about the job they were doing, and began focusing on the moneymaking side of it. The existing controls were really weak and didn’t work at all. They did almost nothing to prevent so-called “doctors” or better called “unqualified practitioners”, and to protect patients.

There has been strong support for giving an end to two-for-one offers and time-limited discount deals. For surgery, a two-stage process of written consent for avoiding the rush into going under the knife.

As Keogh said, there’s “a cacophony of concern across society”, and also that there’s “some pretty grubby practices going on”.

As we can conclude about the article, cosmetic surgeries has life-changing consequences, so it becomes extremely important for vulnerable people to not be victims of the aggressive marketing techniques, consciously focused on their market. They need to go deeper than just falling into marketing strategies, since clearly this specific industry’s ethics is hardly found today.

Source Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/cosmetic-surgery-likely-to-face-tough-regulation-after-review-2012-12#ixzz2IAfjBjbf

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!