Matt Canute's Blog

Recently, the CUS brought free coffee for students in the lounge in order to prepare us for finals, so I was shocked to see that many classmates were still lining up for Tim Hortons.

Sue-O Lee, author of SSSNMN, mentioned to me that this was due to us being creatures of habit, and that he usually prefers the taste after it’s been payed for. Although this seems illogical, it’s true. Somehow, coffee does taste better when you pay for it; it’s like a reward for your hard work.

From a marketing perspective, it looks like Tim Hortons is just really good at creating strong relationships with their customers!

Although there are only 2 Tim Hortons on campus, they dominate UBC’s main mall. I counted the amount of Tim Hortons cups vs. Starbucks cups near the Sauder building, and Tim Hortons won 67:23. There were also 15 regular coffee cups, which can be bought from any UBC standard cafe.

In the past few days, we’ve been learning about online marketing. And Tim Hortons hasn’t been doing any marketing online whatsoever. On Twitter, Tim Hortons has 1,075 tweets, and 1,005 followers. In comparison, Starbucks has 8,947 tweets, and 1,854,739 followers. [as of November 29, 2011 1:50 PM]

How is this possible? If they aren’t using QR codes, tweets, and other social media toys, what makes them so successful? Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom, saying what you think the success factors are.

I’m really excited to watch the new Avengers movie coming out next year, mainly because of IRON MAN!

The story of Iron Man is about an engineer who decides to create a suit which grants him an ultimate armour-like protection, weaponry, strength, agility, and the ability to fly.

But recently, researchers at MIT have done just the opposite. They’ve designed a high-tech suit which allows you to feel old, instead.

It has plastic bands to restrict your movement, shoes to make you lose your balance, slippery gloves, glasses to dull your vision, and a harness which gives you bad posture.

MIT’s high-tech suit doesn’t allow us to fly, but it does allow us to better understand the body of the primary consumer [baby boomers], which may help us to develop better products to meet their needs so that we can make lots and lots of money. OH BOY!

The Occupy Wall Street movement is something that has been going on since September 17th, though I’ve only heard of it recently. Surprisingly, it’s appearing to be the largest activism force that America has seen in decades. An overview of the protest’s demands and goals can be found here .

Now the movement even has a corporate sponsor: Ben and Jerry’s, that delicious ice cream brand, is supporting the movement.

Recently , Ben and Jerry’s went out to the protests in New York and began to feed them free ice cream, even without their corporate logo.

Though, this isn’t the first time they’ve been politically active. Their website seems to have an entire section devoted to their activism.
The site talks about their stance on GMO fish, and their efforts to become more environmentally friendly, with things such as their “Hydrocarbon freezer.

Thinking about all of the marketing concepts that I’ve learned in the last month, I would imagine that Ben&Jerry’s is positioning themselves as “the good guys.” It might be working, because I really want to eat their ice cream right about now.

In the first few days of classes, I picked up a free sample of the “campus cards.” They seemed fun, because they were free. Each card had an advertisement on it. Whatever. It was free! And we get discounts for all these places? Free, fun, and saving money! Not bad.

I’ve seen people playing with these cards at various get togethers, and we don’t really mind using billboards as entertainment. I think it was an effective approach for advertising, because I wasn’t aware of these places beforehand. Maybe I’ll try out one of the restaurants, and they’ll gain a big “customer lifetime value” from me!

If this card-trick proves to have strong effects, why not paste advertisements on other free gifts? We could use this tactic for all of the university-life necessities: barf-bags, toilet paper, band-aids, red solo cups, disposable plates/utensils, ear plugs, bottle openers, dartboards, and ping-pong balls.

Sounds like a great idea.

Like most people my age, I haven’t watched a show through cable television for years now. It feels much better to have control of my entertainment; by downloading shows, I don’t have to painfully trudge through the endless commercials anymore.

Unless the commercial is funny. Then I want to watch it. After the Old Spice videos came out, I was happily watching all of them because they were entertainment!  On a hot summer day, a friend of mine pulled out his Old Spice deodorant, and held it proudly as if it were some sort of inside joke. Funny videos seem to be super effective.

The latest funny video I’ve seen is the “Chuck Testa” viral video. If you haven’t watched it yet, watch it. And if you’ve already watched it, watch it again. Because this is hilarious. And it’s an advertisement.

Shortly after this video was released, people on the internet talked about it for weeks, making tributes and funny pictures related to it. Now, as a result, he mainly sells T-shirts!

And I find that fascinating. Because it seems that when a viral video promotes a product, people will buy that product more as a collector’s item rather than its actual use.

In July 2010, there were rumours of Google planning to start its own social networking site. Since Facebook has already positioned itself as “the king of social networking”, there was a high level of confusion and uncertainty as to how well it would work out, especially considering the fact that Google’s previous two attempts, Buzz and Okrut, were failures. In September, they announced that they planned to introduce social networking add-ons that would integrate with their core products such as Gmail or Youtube.

At the same time, Google had been impulsively shopping with purchases of online gaming companies, such as Jambool, Social Deck, Slide, Zyngo, and many others. But it didn’t stop there. Google also stealthily bought like.com, Angstrom, Aardvark and Jaiku. What were they planning to use all of this for?

In November, Google began to pay employees to stay with them. At one point, Google ended up paying an engineer $6 million to not go to Facebook.

It seems as if theres a cold war between the two current “internet superpowers.” It will certainly be fascinating to see how it ends, and what tricks Google has up its sleeves.

Groupon is an innovative new concept that takes advantage of the social media revolution by collaborating with multiple local restaurants or retail stores to create great bargains that can only be activated if enough people “purchase” it within the 24-hour period.

The idea is simple, yet beautifully beneficial for everyone. This commerce site allows unknown small businesses to become more widely well known in the local area, as well as create great deals for customers. And Groupon makes quite a nice amount of cash in the process. An elaborate summary of their business model can be found here.

I would definitely consider this web-site to be entrepreneurial as it has truly innovated a new way to take advantage of the social media mentality.

UPDATE: On November 30th, Google bought Groupon for $6 million. Clearly, they saw some outstanding potential in Groupon’s unique business model.

Many companies these days that try to sell products in the form of digital media have the common problem of dealing with illegal downloading. After all, why pay for something when it’s actually more convenient to download it for free? The online gaming industry suffered from this for many years. An example of this would be Spore; countless hours were spent developing this “revolutionary game” that would supposedly change everything. The only revolutionary thing about Spore, however, was that it was pirated 1,700,000 times in less than three months.

An online gaming company known as Valve, however, seems to have pioneered a successful way to make money by distributing and managing over 1,100 games to about 25 million customers across the globe. Many players are willing to buy the game and “own” it in digital format to be a part of the close-knit online community.

I spend a lot of my time on “Social Bookmark” sites like Reddit or Digg, and I’ve noticed that the online gaming sections will be filled with constant praise for Valve. This is probably due to the fact that they treat their customers very well, as in reading 10,000’s of emails a day and responding to a lot of them. And when they respond to an email, users will share their experience on social media websites.

Approximately 250,000 users view this positive feedback on a daily basis. It seems that in our new social media driven world, treating customers exceptionally well is the best kind of marketing. Finally. When you treat the customers nicely, the customers will sell the product for you.

Let’s suppose that you were seeking a job in the moving industry. What if the employer told you that they would only hire you if you cut your hair? Most of us would probably be happy to comply. However, let’s suppose that you were a part of the Rastafarian movement, and it was against your religious beliefs to cut your hair? Does this count as religious persecution?

Currently, the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission is in the process of suing Lawrence Transportation Systems for refusing to hire Christopher Woodson due to his dreadlocks hairstyle. The company defended its decision by stating that “[their] policy states that hair, facial hair, beards and general grooming must be neat, clean and trimmed.” However, Woodson is in an interesting position, because due to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his employers are required to make “reasonable accommodations” to religious beliefs. Therefore, since the Rastafarian movement encourages its followers to avoid cutting their hair, Woodson has the right keep his hairstyle.

Lawrence Transportation Systems defended themselves again by stating that his hair would cause an “undue hardship on the company,” basically meaning that some customers would feel uncomfortable with Woodson’s hair. Personally, I would feel fine with Woodson moving my furniture around, as long as his hair was clean. It will certainly be fascinating to see how this controversial issue ends.
http://www.inc.com/news/article/2010/10/virginia-company-sued-for-refusing-to-hire-man-with-dreadlocks.html

Just as the previous blog entry discussed BMW’s manufacturing system becoming similar to the Toyota model, it seems that BMW has also decided to imitate  Toyota in the art of developing faulty brake engines.

A few months ago, Toyota was forced to issue a massive recall of up to 437,000 of their cars.  All across the globe, many people found themselves unable to slow down their rapidly accelerating Toyota Prius, resulting in many car accidents, and even the unfortunate deaths of some families.

To say the least, this had certainly caused a large dent in Toyota’s reputation of safety and reliability.

Today, BMW has recalled up to 350,000 of their luxury cars throughout the world. Yet it seems that BMW’s reputation was not damaged as badly as Toyota had been.  This could be due to the fact that, thankfully, there has been no reported accidents or injuries due to the faulty power braking system.  In fact, a further look into the braking problems reveals that the cars were still basically safe.  Rather than losing the brakes altogether, BMW’s cars would experience a very slight reduction in braking due to a possible leak which potentially caused a vacuum loss, essentially just making the brake pedal harder to press.

It is also interesting to note that their recall is completely voluntary. Mr. Robertson, a member of BMW’s board of management for sales and marketing, claimed, “I think we’re behaving in a way that people would expect of a premium brand.” It looks like BMW might have actually managed flipping around their accident into yet another halo effect for the company; it will be interesting to see how consumers react to a company voluntarily admitting that they made a slight mistake.