Our team chose Coca-Cola Company for our group project through voting on Facebook. Every teammate has contributed a lot to our first assignment.  Everyone was responsible to one part and finished it so well. And of course, we finally got a great result on this assignment. 🙂 As for the assignment, we went in a wrong direction at the beginning. Thanks to Elyssa, she pointed out after reading the textbook. We redid it together without any complaint. Although we got a score that a bit lower than the class average, it was not that bad. We read through the comments left by the professor and discussed it. Then we decided to change the segmentation part which is the basis of the assignment 3. Honestly, the third assignment was the most interesting one among these three. We came up with a lot of crazy and funny ideas during our third meeting. At the end, Tiffany’s idea of interview was adopted. We separated the filming work into two days in order to fit everyone’s schedule. We had a lot of fun and laughed a lot during the filming. After these happy moments, we came to think about editing. Tim is responsible for it and he did a really great job! To be honest, it was super embarrassing and awkward seeing myself in the video. And I found that I couldn’t help tittering in a scenario in which I was supposed to be sad.

I’m so glad that I was in such a great team. Each teammate is easy-going, hard-working and willing to listen to each other. Everyone got individual work, like research, done before the time we set for ourselves and left enough time to organize the information into paragraphs. We prepared the script, information of 4Ps. We didn’t assign anyone anything, but just to do what you could do. No one just lean back, crossed the arms, and sat there. Everyone made a great effort. We did our best. 🙂

This blog is in response to an external blog Real-Life Instagram Project Filters in Unique View of London by Jessica Gioglio.

In Jessica’s blog, she mentions that managers want to reach ripple effects through social media or some campaigns. A ripple effect refers to an effect from an initial state can be followed outwards incrementally. Obviously, a ripple effect would help generate high profit for a company, higher revenue due to greater exposure and follow-up among audience for instance. However, not every company is able to capture audience’s attention through social media.

With the great development of social media, companies take it as an important way to promote their products. Nevertheless, the competition on social media is fierce. How can a company’s online promotion stand out from millions of ads and catch audience’s eyes? From my perspective, a great “bomb” is essential for capturing audience’s attention. Just like few years ago, a company made a huge cake and put it in the center of downtown and gave it away to people walking by. Companies need to create something that surprise people or make them feel curious. As long as they are interested in or curious about what they have seen, they would explore more about the product. Once a company succeeds generating the “bomb”, then it needs to think about how to get its product into a ripple effect. In Jessica’s blog, people stop and take a snap because they saw others doing it. In my opinion, it is more like creating a trend. When a company comes to this, there are so many factors need to be taken into account. The first must be the product itself. Does it have good quality? Does it fulfill the need of target consumers? What’s more, some fancy things are significant as well. We might have noticed that most of time people are attract by some other things that seem not related to the core product but finally they become the consumers of the product. 

This post is in response to our Marketing fellow Alex Meisner’s Using Sex to Sell.

I do agree what the author said, that many advertisements are using sex to sell their products, in which women are portrayed as “things” of sexual desire. These ads are extremely unethically to me as well. At the end of the blog, the author leaves a question, “do we really need sex to sell?” From my perspective, everything happened with reasons. I am pretty sure that they know that it is unethical, nevertheless, why do companies use sex in advertising still? In my own opinion, sex is an effective selling tool, and that is one of the reasons why marketers keep using sex in the advertising in spite of the ethical issue. To some extent, the ads adopting sexual concept would bring higher profit to the company compared to using art or music in the ad.

A feature of sex in adverting is that the imagery used, such as that of a pretty woman, typically has no connection to the product being advertised (Sex in advertising, Wikipedia). Obviously, the image of sex used in advertising aims at attracting attention. Some people argue that a funny picture, an eye-catchy art or even just a creative caption can easily grab audience’s attention. Stepping further from just to grab audience’s attention at first sight, generating controversies probably is what the marketers want. As a result, to create the familiarity of the product. When an ad becomes controversial, it is easily to find that many people around you are talking about the ad, many comments or arguments about the ad in social media. When you finally realized that you are surrounding by the information about the product sold in that controversial ad, the product has been placed into your mind. In my point of view, also from a consumer perspective, people are likely to buy something they are familiar with or they’ve often heard of. And consumers are unlikely to take ad in to account when they are considering which product should they buy, while other factors, such as functions, are not that much different. Therefore, the sex in advertising may help generate more profit by instilling the image of the product to consumers.

To continue the topic on Nu Skin Enterprises in the last blog, this time, I would like to talk about the marketing techniques used in the promotion. Continuing the example of the case in China, Nu Skin Company in China gives training to their direct consumers – people who buy products directly from Nu Skin company and sell the products to others. One of the most important parts of training these sellers is to teach them how to promote and sell the products through social media. The promoting posts written by different sellers but are surprisingly almost the same. Basically, pictures of users’ BEFORE and AFTER (as shown in the picture at the bottom) and their good comments is a must in the post. And then, the sellers sometimes post some pictures showing that some movie stars or singers were buying or bought the Nu Skin products. According to the seven principles we learned in the marketing class, it is obvious that social valuation and authority principle are the main tools they used. Social valuation, people tend to follow the majority doing which eventually became social effects. If the majority says the product is good, then consumers tend to believe the product is good since most people are saying the same thing. Authority principle says that people tend to respect people who are better than them. Of course, these two are not the only techniques the sellers used in their promoting post. Other techniques are recognized as pseudoscience marketing techniques which may fool people to believe advertisements, such as the creation of “phantom” goal (extreme claims without evidence). Someone may say “so what” because he or she has never ever been fooled by these ads. But if we put ourselves in the shoes of most nowadays consumers, we can easily see how powerful these ads are and how useful these techniques are. Compared to the generations which our parents and grandparents are in, we will see that our generation are not as rational as theirs. We rarely think deeper before doing purchases. Therefore, we easily believe the exaggerated words in the ads.

.

Nu Skin Enterprises is an American direct selling and multilevel marketing company which develops and sells personal care products and dietary supplements (“Nu Skin Enterprise”). Nu Skin was found 1984 and it has become extremely popular in recent years in many countries in particular to China, while the company claims that they never spend money on advertising. They use pyramid scheme to sell their products, that basically people (direct consumers) purchase products from the company and try to sell the products to the people (indirect consumers) they know, such as friends, classmates and relatives. Take the case in China as an example. From no one knows this brand, to one third of your friends are doing business with Nu Skin, personally, I feel like it is what happened overnight. And noticeably, most people who are selling Nu Skin product are around the age of 20, or say, Y generation. What amazed me is that they all have EXTREMELY GREAT passion. One of my friends, who has got involved with Nu Skin, believes that Nu Skin gives them an opportunity to do their own businesses, earn money and gives them a great way to the bright future. Obviously, it is the result of brainwashing. In my point of view, one of the reasons why the brainwashing works is that Nu Skin has noticed that nowadays people, especially Y generation, are more interested in earning quick bucks. Generally, Nu Skin is targeting the people who want to get benefits or value but not willing to pay that much effort. As what I mentioned above, there is no advertisement expense on Nu Skin. Personally, I think what they claim is true. From the people who are doing business with Nu Skin, I found that these direct consumers are always doing marketing or advertising for Nu Skin for free. Since they want to sell all the products they hold in hand and earn more extra benefits, they are engaged in selling. In order to sell those products, they may make exaggerated comments on the products to let their potential clients believe that the product has much more value than what it really is. Additionally, the reason why the pyramid scheme works is that now the whole world economics is in recession. It is hard to find an appropriate job which can meet both physical and mental need.

Advertising has become one of the most important ways to promote products and attract potential customers. It is a convenient way to convey information about products to all audiences. However, advertising has also come under fire for involving unethical issues. The print ad I found is the one posted by Sisley, one of the clothing lines of Benetton Group. There is no doubt that this ad is very eye-catchy and a large percentage of audience may stop for it. As an ad, which functions as attracting more potential customer, to some extent, it is creative and successful.  In my point of view, however, when it comes to the issue of ethics, it appears unethical. Two girls in the ad look as if they are snorting. Of course, the white stuff in the ad is a dress but it looks like heroin. I think what Sisley want to convey to audience in this ad is how good and fashionable their products are – once you buy one piece of clothes, you will be addicted to buying clothes from Sisley, just like taking drugs. Generally, adults are mature. They would not be misled by this ad. But as for young people, who are not as mature as adults, the image of taking drug in this ad matters.  Young people or people who are not mature enough might be instilled a message that taking drug just a simple thing like buying fashionable outfits when they see this ad again and again through different media such as magazines. Additionally, many teenagers like imitating the people that they think “cool”. Here, girls may imitate the women in the ad since they are sexy, attractive, etc. Therefore, those girls might easily be persuaded to “have a try” by the guys who are selling drugs. Therefore, I feel that this ad is not ethical although it is a great print ad.

Welcome to UBC Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!