Month: November 2010

Winter is rolling in, snow is falling, fireplaces are being lit up, and the day that everyone has been waiting for all year is upon us. Christmas.. of course not, I’m talking about the release of the highly anticipated part 1 of the last movie in the Harry Potter series. Now I’m not a die hard Harry Potter fan like many people are, but I’ve read the books, and I’ve seen a few of the movies, and I actually just went to the 7th one last Tuesday. While sitting in the theatre and watching all the trailers for new movies that are going to be coming out, I couldn’t help but realize that not once had I seen a trailer for the Harry Potter movie… in fact I don’t think I know anyone who has!

This is unreal to me, because Harry Potter is so popular, and most of the Potter fans are so hardcore, that even without any advertising, the movie still managed to earn $125,017,372 opening weekend, which was more than every other movie playing in theatres combined earned.

This is a super smart move on the part of the advertising department for the Harry Potter movies, in that they realize Harry Potter fans act almost like a cult, and they probably knew the exact date that the movie was going to be released months in advance, and no advertising was needed at all! So instead of spending tons of money on super expensive TV advertisements, or any other type of advertisements at all really, they just let word of mouth spread about the new movie, and still earned a TON of money. They knew their product well, knew the type of audience and market that would be interested in their product, and knew what tactics they needed to use, and which were unnecessary.

Anyways, just a short one for today… it’s snowing and I’m gonna go play in it : ) Bye guys!

On Sunday night I was watching Desperate Housewives (great show..watch it) and a commercial came on. Now usually I absolutely hate commercials, and I just fast-forward through them, but the one caught my eye… anyways to save you the time of me explaining the entire commercial, I found it on youtube for ya, so enjoy..

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I don’t know why… but I find this commercial absolutely hilarious, so i wanted to show it to some of my friends, and when I searched for it on youtube, I found ANOTHER video that made things a little more interesting….

If you look at the original “keyboard cat”, the video was posted  in 2007, and it has a whopping 10, 632,948 hits, making it an incredibly popular video. Now check out the pistachio commercial keyboard cat, this commercial was created on November 1, 2010, and it already has almost 100,000 hits. Now you might be wondering… so what? Besides being an advertisement what does keyboard cat have to do with marketing?

WELL, the thing that I find incredible, is the Wonderful Pistachio marketing team must have stumbled onto the hilarious clip of the original keyboard cat, along with 10.6  million other people, and noticed that for some reason, this appeals to the public, and a LOT of people are interested in this character. With this, they were able to create a commercial, over 3 years later, using an internet personality to sell their product. In fact, before this commercial I had never in my life heard of the company Wonderful Pistachio, and most people weren’t that intrigued by them as a company. If you look up any other Wonderful Pistachio commercial on youtube, they have under 60,000 hits, and have been up for at least a year. Now I’ll remind you that THIS particular Wonderful Pistachio commercial has racked up 100,000 hits in 2 weeks.

I think this commercial is going to be huge for the Wonderful Pistachio company, as it has already gotten so many people’s attention, and is bound to keep going while on the air, and while word of mouth spreads. By simply taking a cat that for some strange reason people love, they are going to have the potential of becoming a more well known company… I’m thinking the marketing department at Wonderful Pistachio is going to deserve a raise after this one!

Okidokes, thats about it… hope ya liked the commercial : )

So I was going through some blogs of my classmates, and I came across one that was pretty interesting by Anna, which would be found here. In it she was talking about how Photoshop is used in a ton of advertisements now, and it’s basically deceiving consumers into purchasing products that they think will make them appear the way the ad (which has clearly been photo-shopped) appears.

So for example, I searched up this ad with Jessica Alba in it. Now, I’m just using common sense here but I bet that most people would rather attend the party on the right, than the party on the right… disagreements? Probably not. The party on the right features a fun loving perfect looking Jessica Alba being surprised by the ‘accidental’ splash of water, some sort of fun looking drum in the foreground suggesting some live music is going on, and a top-notch dressed waiter carrying a tray of probably free alcoholic beverages all occurring on what looks like the sunniest day of the universe. Trust me… the line for this party would be around the block; as for the party on the left… line up… not so much. On the left, there is no cool music… just a mans arm, no accidental fun loving splash of water, we can’t even tell the man behind Alba is a waiter let alone with free alcoholic beverages, and, while still beautiful, Alba looks a little disheveled and her eyes are closed.  This, ladies and gentlemen, represents the wonders of photoshop and marketing. Marketers can use editing techniques to instantaneously improve a potential customers idea of a product, without offering anything new. The way I see it, there’s good and bad things associated with this.

Starting with the bad. Consumers never really know what they’re getting. Does the concealer they’re buying really cover undereye circles? Who knows. It very well might, but it could easily have been photoshopped to appear as such. In this such case, consumers are being tricked into buying products that they believe work one way, when really they do not.

Now on the other hand… I think photoshop can be good. Say someone thinks they’re ugly, crying every night, and they now have really puffy eyes as a consequence. Feeling pretty down on themselves and their now unfortunate eyes, they read a magazine and in it they see an advertisement for an under eye roller that eliminates eye puffiness, as portrayed in the (photoshopped) image. They rush to the store, buy the eye roller and apply it, and while it doesn’t really do anything… they believe it has because hey, the ad showed it did, and they suddenly feel better about themselves and don’t think they’re ugly anymore. While I know this example is kind of out there, it gets my point across. Photoshopped ads let us believe what we want to believe, and can psychologically make us think a product is working wonders and is super beneficial to us when it really isn’t. Some people might think this is deceiving and wrong, but really is it? People buy the under eye roller wanting to fix their problem so they can feel more confident and better about the way they look, so if they get the same result in the end, without actually maybe fixing the problem in its entirety as promised, is it really that bad? I don’t think so.

Anyways team, gotta go so let me know what you think about photoshop too!

goooooodday.

Hooolaaaa friends!

I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of you have heard of the world famous jeans company The Gap. They are well known for their jeans, their children’s clothing, and most of all their world famous white-lettering-on-navy-blue-background logo. The simple yet effective logo has been a trademark of The Gap for as long as many can remember, and it is hands down associated to the brand; so why would the marketing team at the The Gap have any incentive to change it? Recently, The Gap announced that they would be changing their logo to a new “more contemporary, modern expression.”, and they released images of it over the internet for consumers to see. After just a few days of the logo being viral, it wasn’t received very well to say the least. Gap consumers immediately flooded the internet with their displeasure, calling the new logo horrid, disgusting, and boring, and only 1 week after introducing the new logo, The Gap announced they would revert back to the original.

What intrigued me was not only the fact that they pulled the logo after only one measly week… but the fact that The Gap never once defended their new logo, or tried to get the public on their side with it. They simply introduced the logo, and withdrew it… Seems a little fishy to me. It doesn’t seem to make sense that The Gap would go through all that work and spend all that money designing a new logo, just to simply pull it after receiving some poor feedback. Apparently quite a few people agree with me and believe that it was all a marketing ploy. The Gap, being not the most new and upcoming company, hasn’t really been talked about in media or in the public in general for a while now, and after this apparent “logo flop” they were all anyone was talking about for a week, had articles published about them in the paper, and were being tweeted about everywhere; people started talking about The Gap again. To top it off, The Gap even wrote letters to the public basically saying that they respect the public opinion tremendously, and they changed the logo back to please the public. This was another intelligent marketing strategy for The Gap to use, because now they have risen in the eyes of the consumer. They are now more known as a brand that listens to consumers and does whatever they ask for… a very good thing for any brand.

So yeah, maybe they were actually planning on using the new logo, and maybe The Gap is just a brand that listens to their customers 100%, but honestly… I think there’s a little more to it than that.