Melissa Lui

Marketing, My First Impression.
From my knowledge and what I heard from people, marketing is simply about how a company sells and launches its products.  Marketing is a field that is fun and enables people to incorporate and share their creativities and ideas. It sounds like a course that would be enjoyable, engaging, or basically just not difficult and straightforward.  So, walking into my first marketing class, I was slightly excited.

And Now?
As the semester goes on, I learned that there are a lot more about marketing than what I heard and expected.  Yes, it is still about the launching of a product but there are many steps behind it.  There are researches, analysis, planning, budgeting, and more subparts in each process. It is not as simple as I thought. Moreover, the success of a company is dependent on marketing. How well a company spends its funds, how much profits are generated, and etc. are still factors that affect a company; but marketing is where success begins. Marketing is a bridge that allow consumers to cross the river and reach to the company.  A bridge that has to be strong, attractive, and durable so that consumers will walk on to it without hesitation.

What I gained from this semester?
I believe that I have enhanced on my analysis skill. Because throughout the marketing plan assignment, analysis is a huge part of it. We have to analyze on different factors in the company, the environment, and potential customers. It allows me to not just look at the surface of things, but to understand and go more in depth. It is not something that only applies on marketing, but in my daily life in general.  It is easy to get carried away by the outlook and the packaging of a subject but the core and the meaning behind are what important and influential. In conclusion, marketing has been an engaging course that provided an opportunity for me to apply my knowledges in real life scenarios.

Response to classmates, Cam Kroeker’s post:  “How much skin is too much skin?”

Placing advertisements on girls’ thighs can be quite controversial. For example, in a feminist perspective, since the girls are being paid to advertise on their body parts, these girls can be seen as selling their body parts as walking billboards. In other words, these girls are objectified and exploited. Moreover, by allowing advertisements placing on their thighs and taking pictures of them, girls are encouraging media to focus on a particular body part of themselves. As a result, this phenomenon preserves the view of how a woman’s body can be seen as different separate pieces instead of a whole human being. Furthermore, this gives another legit reason for creepers to stare at girls. On the other hand, somefeminists may think that the women have the choice to place the advertisement on their bodies or not. This phenomenon sort of demonstrates how women have the rights to determine how they want to treat their bodies.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2281826/Enterprising-firms-rent-ad-space-young-Japanese-womens-bare-legs.html

 
However, in a more economic view, having all these walking billboards can be quite beneficial. As the girls need to have their advertisements on for eight hours, wherever they go they will attract attention. This can be seen as a relatively effective way to spread around any information on new products or companies. Moreover, it is relatively cheap to get such an effect.

After considering the motivation and the criticism of this phenomenon, I agree with Cameron that it seems to be quite immoral. I do not think it is acceptable for companies to use female body parts to attract attentions from strangers. It reinforces the objectification of women.

With technology getting more advanced day by day, it is hard for advertisers to not take advantages of it. Undoubtedly, Photoshop is a good invention for the advertisement marker since it can beautify the pictures. Photoshop boosts up some of the colours that may not be very prominent in the background. In this way, these advertisements that are printed in magazines can easily attract attentions.

However, if Photoshop is misused, it can create false advertisement.

For example, if an advertisement is trying to promote a skin product, and the company decides to photoshop the model’s skin into perfection, the advertisement is producing a manipulative message. In my opinion, it will be immoral for the marketing industry to use photoshop as a way to lie to the audience. Also, there are many models in the advertisements who are photoshopped into a skinner version. In this case, it is not only immoral to the audience, as well as to the models. Why can’t the industry accept the natural body shapes or the beauty that these models impose? The industry is just reinforcing such artificial or unhealthy beauty that is circulating in the society. These false advertisement can potentially damage someone’s life. As audience is bombarded by the photoshopped images every day, they may feel like they are pressured into changing themselves to match the social standard or expectation.

Since beauty is socially constructed, why can’t the industry promote something healthier and more natural? It is necessary for the marketing industry to critically analyze the action of photoshopping and the consequences that a few clicks may cause.

Even though I agree with KRASHINSKY , author of the article, I decide to put on my critical lenses for a second here and ask myself, “what is the motivation of Dove?” First of all, it is obvious that Dove is trying to get some attention by revealing how other companies have used photoshop in their advertisement. They may also be trying to underlie a message which says we are different; our advertisements are real. By launching a campaign to support natural beauty for boosting girls’ self esteem, Dove is also marketing themselves. Dove is trying to use audiences’ sympathy and awareness of photoshop to buy their products in support of a self esteem education. How can buying their products change one’s self esteem or provide education? The answer is not included in the video. In an economic standpoint, every company is just trying to get some profits out of their advertisement by attracting more customers, more demands.

However, where does morality lie?

I came across with this article last day, How Retailer Are Boosting Sales With B2C Video Content, and it caught my attention since I wrote about Content Marketing a month ago.  So now, I would like to continue from there but today, we will look at a particular content – Video.

Video becomes a very popular online marketing tool in recent years. According to the article, YouTube is ranked as the 2nd popular search engine, just after Google. Moreover, there is a 200% increase of video usage as a content marketing tool in 2012 comparing to 2011.

Even though many companies are integrating the use of videos on their websites, but is video really effective?  Or are they just creating video because other companies do?

I think that many companies overlook one important factor.  48 hours of video are uploaded on YouTube in every minute, but only a small amount of those videos would catch the attention and share across social media. Just like the picture below, companies expect the sales to increase because of the integration of videos?  But in order to increase sales, your video has to “go viral” (circulated across the Internet) competing with the millions of videos being upload every hour.

Overall, to stand out from competitors, the content in the video is really important.  Just as I mentioned a month ago, the content has to be entertaining, creative, engaging, and yet relevant to your company’s products in some way.  But moreover, the quality of the video, the story line, and etc. would be critical if a video would be successful.  It can be a time consuming process.  Many companies are creating videos because it is the new trend; however, would the videos be able to reach your company’s targeted audience or consumers? And is the content of the video relevant to the company’s objective? These are questions that should be answered before you blindly invest your time and money into video marketing.

Just because it is a trend, it does not mean that it is a must.

In his recent blog post, Creative Content Marketing in the UK – Winning Hearts, Minds & Wallets, Lee Oden talks about the trend of online and content marketing. Oden talks about the difficulties to sustain content marketing, especially on creating contents for your business or company on a continuous basis. However, if one does manage to do so, his or her company will then be differentiated from to the others.

Before going on to my response, many may be wondering “What is Content Marketing?“
Content marketing is another form of marketing where media or publishing content are used to attract and engage with customers.  It does not advertise specific product or service that one’s company is providing, but instead it delivers information that is valuable and engaging to the audience.

I agree with Oden that online and content marketings have been a trend in recent years.  With the increasing amount of Internet users, many people (especially the younger generation) now turn to their computer or laptop for information and advertisements.  And therefore, more and more companies invest their time to establish their presences through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and etc. To connect and build a relationship with Internet users, content marketing has became the main stream.  Besides on telling the audiences how great their products and services are, companies begin to attract customers by sharing entertaining, inspiring, and useful information.

However, one of the most important things for these companies is to maintain the quality of contents that they are updating.  I know how difficult it is to have meaningful contents because I work for a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company where I need to update its blog on a daily basis. And here are some ways I use to improve and ensure that the published contents are engaging. Every month, I read and analyze the statistics of how many people visited the website and how many responses there were.  Through that, I know what kind of contents (video, more photos, or more words) is most effective and I am able to grasp on which area or certain topics my audience are enjoying and interested in.  Moreover, I also emphasize on the use of ‘keywords’ on each blog posts.  What keywords do are like hash-tag for Tumblr and Instagram, it allows users to search a specific word and all tagged materials will be in the search results. By integrating keywords into the contents, as Internet users search that word in the google search bar, your content will be showing up the result pages.

Starbucks has recently launched a online contest called “Name Your Blend” which is opened only to Canadians.  It is a chance for Starbucks’ lovers in Canada to rename the Blonde Roast – Veranda.

Why  is this for Canadians only?
It is because that the Veranda blend is a success in Canada.  In average, Canadians drink twice as much of the Blonde Roast comparing to Americans; and in particular to the Veranda blend. It is a reward to the customers in Canada, but also a celebration to Blonde Roast’s one year launch

“One of many ways we build meaningful relationships with our customers”
In the value-based marketing era, building a good customer relationship has became a core or important factor to succeed in the market.  As a beverage business, Starbucks has did an excellent job on building customer relationships.  Besides on providing good services and good coffee, they have a reward system which allow customers to have a free drink or snack on their birthday and collect “stars” (which are like points) to go on a further level of the reward system to receive more benefits. By doing so, customers would be purchasing more often and is also a good way to maintain its customer base. And with this naming contest, Starbucks creates connection with their customers.  A name of a product is very important as it gives the first impression to people who have not tried the Veranda blend. In my opinion, Starbucks is putting quite a huge decision in the winner’s hand because the name could be something completely unrelated to the blend.  It should be a name that represents the taste, texture, and smell of the blend, and yet is memorable and attractive. Anyhow, this contest allows customers to be involved as a part of Starbucks. Even though it is only naming one of the many blends, Starbucks has shown that they want to include their customers in different parts of the world – Canada first.

Sources 1
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Have you noticed that most of the fashion advertisements use skinny or even underweight models? Even though many brands promote their clothing are made for women of all shapes and sizes, their advertisements say the opposite.

One of the examples is Levi’s.  In 2011, Levi’s created a marketing campaign for the Curve ID Jeans with the slogan, “Hotness Comes in All Shapes and Sizes”.  It might sound like a successful and friendly campaign; however, Levi’s failed.  Instead of including different shapes and sizes of models,  most of their ads were featured with models who seemed to be the same size and fairly skinny.  Even though there was an ad showing plus-sized models with hip sizes range from 36″ to 47″, Levi’s somehow decided to say that they were all size 32.

Levi’s campaign and advertisement were simply contradicting; and yet, Levi’s was not the only company who did that.  There are many more brands, such as Mark and Spencer, Topshop, etc., that use skinny and mostly underweight models on runways and advertisement.  These companies, purposely or unintentionally, portray a false idea of certain thinness is the standard beauty.

Using too-skinny models is not a topic that just arises in the fashion industry.  It has been criticized for years as it causes teenagers to go on diet, believing that they have to be skinny in order to be pretty.  Recently, Israel has a new law which models have a Body Mass Index below 18.5 are prohibited to be in advertisements.  Moreover, many fashion shows, such as Milan’s Fashion Week and Madrid Fashion Show, also ban models who are underweight to be on the runways.

With these new enforcements, the fashion industry should recognize that the conception of beauty has changed from skinny to healthy.

“You will also generate more business because people will appreciate your honest attempt to include all women and not just the model stereotype.”source