Recently I have come across an article called “Marketing Must Be Remarkable” and I decided to share some of my thoughts on it.

The author of the article makes a point that the main obstacle that all companies face is “cutting through the clutter’ to catch our attention. With so many different competitors in the market it is hard for some companies to get noticed. The author of the article claims that in order to be truly successful your marketing strategy has to be remarkable. In the article Starbucks was used as an example of a company with remarkable marketing. And I mean it’s true – they charge 5-6 bucks for a cup of coffee and people still pay that premium for it! This is because Starbucks, through their remarkable marketing strategy demonstrated value to their customers that they are willing to pay for.

I thought about the points made in the article and I must say that I do truly agree with them. In reality, no matter how great your marketing mix is, no matter how awesome your positioning statement is – if you do not stand out you will never get the consumers’ attention. I started thinking of some other brands with remarkable marketing and the first ones to come were Apple, BMW, Nike. All those brands convinced the consumers that they are different which resulted in people paying extra for the brand as they perceived it as highly differentiated from the rest.

At the end of the day, no matter how good your marketing strategy is, to succeed you have to make it different, unique, remarkable and go all out which is why certain brands are so much more successful than others.

I was browsing through various blog posts made other students when I bumped into a blog post “Coke Vs Pepsi” by Pouya Siadat. I never really realized that Pepsi was directly attacking Coke in a number of its commercials. Pouya made an interesting point that Pepsi has had to do that over the years because their sales were lower than Coke’s so they had to prove to the customer that they are better. That got me thinking about whether there are any other companies that have been competing for a number of years. The first example that came to mind was the never-ending  battle between RIM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone. iPhone has been outperforming Blackberry in terms of sales for quite some time now.

It is interesting to note that Apple’s commercials always focused on simplicity and ease of use whereas Blackberry’s commercials were always focused on the phones functionality and it’s usefulness for the business professional.

As RIM’s sales started to decrease and the market share started to drop, they became threatened by the iPhone and made this commercial that directly attacked Apple.

The commercial was not focusing on the functionality of the new phone but rather was designed to show off RIM’s confidence that their product is still better than Apple’s.  It is very interesting to see how some companies shift focus in their marketing campaigns to accommodate various external factors such as change in their own market power and the competition’s influence.

My name is Orhan Eldarov and I am a second year student at the Sauder School of Business. When I was younger, in my head the word marketing and advertising meant the same thing. It was not until I’ve had a chance to do some marketing myself when I realized that it’s so much more. In my first year at UBC I got to participate in some marketing campaigns for various philanthropy and social events on behalf of my fraternity. I realized that marketing is not just all about advertising. It’s about developing a relationship with your target audience in order to develop their loyalty. In my case, we had to market our events in a way that would make the students want to come back again and again. In order to achieve that goal we decided to take an interactive marketing approach to involve the students and get them excited about our events. For example, for one of our themed parties, we created a little competition for whoever posts a 90’s song with the most ‘likes’ on our event page on Facebook. We ended up having over 100 submissions within several days and over 700 people ended up attending the party. It was very cool to read about the exact same concept in the textbook! This made me really look forward to the rest of the course because I realized how useful and applicable it is to real life. I can’t wait to try out all the new marketing concepts I learned about to my own marketing endeavors.

– O