Month: October 2010

Found this old commercial from the 90’s about Sensodyne Toothpaste. Positioning statements have been around longer than we have, that’s for sure. Check it out.!

Was going through the blogs of  some of my classmates and I came across one that really caught my attention.

Negar Amiri’s blog post entitled “Advertising at the wrong time” (http://negamiri.wordpress.com) was something that I hadn’t really though about before. For many non profit organizations, funding comes from their sponsors. How else are they supposed to get funding right? But Negar brought up an excellent point in her post which was that there is a point where an organization has too many sponsors and takes the attention away from what the non profit organization is actually setting out to do. In addition, she talked about how many of the sponsors do not even relate to the organization whatsoever. It seems as though many companies see non profit organizations as an opportunity to advertise and therefore their strategy is to market their own company through organizations that need funding. It doesn’t even matter what the organization is all about. A goal for companies to work towards is to sponsor companies that share similar values and mission statements. This would help to indicate to the general public that they are not all about getting their name out there and actually share something with another organization.

Great blog Negar! Keep up the good work 🙂

Till next week.

As a regular watcher of the Simpsons, I was thinking about  how marketing applies to one of the characters on the show.

For people who have no clue what I’m talking about, one of the characters on the Simpsons named Ned Flanders decides to give up his career as a pharmacist and open up a store just for left handed people. He named this store “The Leftorium”.

There was obviously some STP in this decision. He segmented his market down to his geographic area firstly which was the town of Springfield. Even further down, there was a very specific group of people that he had in mind as his target market. Seeing as how only 10% of the world is left handed, there was a very specific need that Ned was addressing with this idea for a store.

To Ned’s surprise, there was more of a need for this store than he thought. There were many cases where people wish they had a product suited for left handed people from scissors to can openers. These customers were more than happy to buy products from Ned because of the value that they were getting.

Ned did a good job of identifying a need, marketing through word of mouth, and providing value to customers. This just goes to show that marketing truly is everywhere, even in your favorite cartoon.

It has come to my attention that just because your target market is a certain age group, there’s no reason that you can’t target other age groups at the same time. Think about all ages events for nightclubs. It’s a great way to introduce the nightclub environment to kids while they are underage. It gives kids an incentive to attend these events because it will be part of an experience that they are not supposed to have until the age of 19 (or 21 in the States). It also helps that these events are often promoted by youth who have a large social network and can easily approach people of their age group.

These events are an effective, but somewhat controversial method of promotion that has really seemed to have taken off with no end in sight.

Till next time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lZMr-ZfoE

The biggest selling point of the IPhone is its versatility. In the commercials above, the IPhone is used for a number of different tasks: looking up restaurants, movies, music, surfing the web, , checking email, playing games, and of course the phone feature. It is also advertised as a very user friendly phone that is simple to operate and performs a number of tasks. The Iphone would be perceived as a product of great value to people who want one device that allows them to do all of the things listed above and more. Therefore, the price would not be an issue for people who feel they would get a lot out of the phone. The product is also easy to find which means that the product is in the places where consumers can get ahold of them. The target market seems to be students and young professionals who are always on the go and need to be mobile. There are also a lot of fun applications that would be intended for a younger group of people as well. Apple caters to this market and makes the Iphone seem like a necessity for people in this market.