nuruljannah isa's blog

The recent blog post of Yue Wang talked about the 4Ps of Coca-Cola company. In the blog, it is stated that the promotion that Coca-Cola currently using is effective, making customers attracted to the product. I have to agree with Yue Wang because Coca-Cola is really good at making people aware of their products in various types of promotion mix.

The company always has great advertisements that will capture the attentions of their buyers for the Coca-Cola soft drinks. Each advertisement of Coke has shown its expressiveness since it will have something red or white as the background colours (which are Coca-Cola official colours). There are also different Coca-Cola advertisements from different countries because Coca-Cola is trying to attract their target customers from everywhere in the world. Thus, they will have to create different themes of advertisements for many different countries so the advertisements correspond to the culture of the countries.

Coca-Cola also has good public relations. Coca-Cola “Open Happiness” marketing campaign leads it to expand campaign by launching a lot of videos that show they create happiness to publics. The video below shows an example of PR video of Coca-Cola that is targeting the university students.

Coca-Cola achieved to make the students smile and happy through their vending machines. PR helps Coca-Cola engages consumers in an event that is relevant and plausible. Thus, students and other people who watched the video can relate happiness with Coca-Cola. Other examples of Coca-Cola’s PR are it has sponsored a lot of events such as The American Idol, Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, WWF and many more.

All the examples of promotion mix above shows that Coca-Cola use pull strategy for their marketing activities as they spend a lot on advertising and consumer promotion to induce final consumers to buy Coca-Cola.

A blogpost in drewsmarketingminute.com states “for your brand to be effective, sticky and enduring — it has to be about what matters to your consumers”. For example, if consumers do not care about green products, they will not buy the products and leading them to not care about the brand of the green products. This applies that in order to have a good brand, the characteristics of the brand must be based on how the consumers value the products. There are three brand characteristics which are brand personality, status and equity. Apple Inc. is very good at branding its products by focusing its consumers’ value and creates the characteristics for its brand. Apple uses the terms innovative, imagination and design as its brand personality because they know that a lot of people value innovation and imagination. Apple has a higher-status brand than its other competitors because it knows that majority of its consumers value the personality of the Apple’s brand itself. Its brand equity is also high as the prices of its products are slightly higher than other brands. Thus, it is very important for a company to create their brand characteristics based on their future and current consumers’ interests instead of their own interests. The brands that are based on their consumers’ values usually has great consumers loyalty and results to higher product sales as the brands will come first in the consumers’ minds when they are thinking of buying the particular products.

Founder of TOMS, Blake Mycoskie with the kids

Last week, I went to the UBC Bookstore to validate my U-Pass and I found out that TOMS Shoes are sold there. We can also see that a lot of students are wearing TOMS Shoes even though it is relatively more expensive than other brands. TOMS is a for-profit company that donates a pair of its shoes for a child in need for every pair purchased by consumers.

As I was reading Jessica’s blog post, she stated that cause-related marketing is a good marketing strategy for a company and it also benefits charitable organizations and customers. I have to agree with her opinion because TOMS Shoes is a very successful brand since we can see that almost everyone has a pair of TOMS shoes. This means that consumers now care about social welfare and they are trying to help people who are in need as best as they can.

Because of its successful sales of shoes, TOMS have expanded their products by selling eyeware “to give the gift of sight to those in need”, as stated in brandchannel.com. TOMS believe that they can expand their products because they are marketing their brands by using people’s self-concept in personality.  TOMS can be categorized under sincerity traits for its brand personality since it is trying to help people in need. Thus, people who think that they have the same trait with TOMS (sincerity) will buy their products.

Below is a YouTube video showing Blake Mycoskie, TOMS’ founder, talking to Ellen Degeneres about the personality and self-concept of his consumer which I happened to watch last week in The Ellen Degeneres Show.

Adweek.com stated that a lot of people love the GAM Ads, proving that Apple knows how to make the watchers remember them. GAM is a campaign that compares the products and customer values of PCs and Macs by Apple Inc. It has 66 advertisements acted by Justin Long (a Mac) and John Hodgman (a PC) that lasted for 3 years (2006-2009).

It is clearly shown that Apple had deep customer insight so they can relate Mac products with customers at a personal level. For example, clearly none of us want our PCs to get infected, and we can see in the advertisement below that Apple has taken care of that problem for us; Mac users will not have to worry about getting any viruses, and even spywares.

Apple has also realized that there was a lack of customer services for PC users. Because of this, they have created Apple Geniuses, in which their main tasks are answering all of customers’ concerns about the Mac products.

A good friend of mine recently went to an Apple Store to buy a 32GB iPad2 with 3G. The Apple Genius told her to buy the 16GB without 3G instead since she will only be using it in classes and that there will be Wi-Fi connection on campus. This clearly showed that the staffs prioritize customer values so they can connect to their customers personally. Apple has created a way to personalize their Apple products to suit our everyday needs.

Because of the good marketing skills and research that Apple has shown in their campaign, Mac products have increased their sales by 12% year-over-year in 2006 (as stated in AdvertisingAge) and this has certainly proven that deep consumer insight will make the consumers believe in the company’s products and its reliability, leading to an increase in Mac purchases.

Hey guys!

I’m Jannah and I’m from Malaysia. This is my second year in Sauder and am hoping that it would be a great year for me.

I am taking Comm 296 this term because it’s already in my STT. Besides that, I have always loved to study marketing because I want to learn how certain products that have good marketing skills can really affect the consumers and leads to creating brands that everyone will know.

I don’t really have an experience with marketing but as a consumer, I’ll always get influenced by the commercials of products. I will also buy the brand of products that I know from advertisements instead of the one that I’ve never heard of because it somehow makes me feel safe to use the brand that I am aware of .

My favourite ad would be “The Joy of Pepsi” commercial by Britney Spears because the song is so catchy and it shows that Pepsi is trying to compete Coca-Cola directly as we can see there are some workers from Coca-Cola who are also enjoying Britney’s ad at 1:09 (see below). Another advertisement that I like which is from my own country, Malaysia would be the ad that is promoting One in a Milion about robbery. It is a singing contest in Malaysia that is similar to the American Idol. The ad is so funny.

Something personal about me: I can be shy at times and I love listening to music. 🙂

During the first term of Comm299 class, I have learnt that I am able to be an outspoken person. I am a very shy person as I am not the kind of person who is able to be the first one to approach a new friend unless that person approaches me first. Because of that, it is usually hard for me to make friends with new people and I find it very uncomfortable to speak alone in front of many people of whom I barely know. The Comm299 Public Speaking session has taught me that I can speak confidently in front of other people. I just need to be more confident and believe in myself and also practice my speech so I can talk smoothly during the class. I have also learnt that confidence plays a very important role in our daily lives if we want to become a successful person. For example, I spoke confidently during my business presentation assignment for Term 1 Comm299 and I got an A as a result. For my mock interview assignment during the second term, I also speak very confidently to the examiner and she gave me a good mark for the interview. We can show to other people that we are confident if we keep our eye contacts, smiling and many other ways. Thus, Comm299 has shown me that I am a confident and outspoken person in my own way. I just need some more time to show that I can be a very confident and outspoken person as I am trying to change myself slowly.

I have learned a lot of great lessons throughout my entire lives. The most recent great lesson that I learnt during this second term in UBC is to never give up. There was one time where I failed my Math105 midterm and because of that, I started to neglect my Math homeworks. I thought that even if I work really hard on the course, I would still fail. A few weeks after, one of my friends showed me a video of a woman who is handicapped (no hands) drove an airplane using legs. She is a very determined and courageous woman. And after seeing that video, I started thinking if someone who does not have a perfectly complete body do not give up in her life and come a successful person, why would I give up on a such small thing like Integration for Calculus? Since then, I started to make the video as my inspiration to work harder for my Math105. I studied very hard for my second midterm so I can cover up my first midterm and because of that, I managed to do all the questions during my second midterm and I really hope that I will not fail it. Even if I still failed my second midterm, I will study still harder for my finals. That woman really has shown me that we do not have to give up on our lives too easily.

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