After reading Alana’s blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/alanabrodie/) on “product placement”, I find that it is very important to market the product correctly in order to gain more customers. For example in this case, Alana mention that “Manolo Blahnik product” became very popular due to the fact that Carrie Bradshaw, a character in Sex and the city TV show, was using it. This is interested how marketing a product through one person can gain this much attention. I had decided to explore further into other advertising strategy.
I had came up with the two advertising strategy that I find very interesting as it is gaining popularity which are Direct and Online Marketing. Direct marketing is connecting directly with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships. Many companies have chosen to employ it. Personally, I have been exposed to this myself and I’d like to talk about it. Amazon has constantly email me if I wanted to buy any product on discounted at that time. So how do they know what I want to buy? Well, I am an existing customer at Amazon, so every time I search any product or make a purchase the system would remember me. By doing so, it is able to personalize an advertisement to me, advertising me only the product I am interested in.
With the combination of direct marketing and online marketing, which is efforts to market products and service and build customer relationships over the Internet, had led Amazon to great success. A online-oriented retailer had great success, as the trend has changed, rather than conventional shopping, consumer prefer online shopping as it would save time, and even money as sales tax may be avoided in some cases.
The benefit of using emails as a direct marketing strategy on online marketing is that it is very cost effective and very efficient as suppose if brochure were sent it would cost more money and time. Also products update can reach customer at a faster pace without any delays. Suppose if you were a TNC like Amazon, you had to send out to customer worldwide, through adopting email method, they are able to reach a broader audience at barely any cost. However, the drawback of this it that it can impact the issue of privacy, as some will think that it is a privacy intrusion. Customer may feel reluctant to subscribe to these ads email and may eventually unsubscribe the service. So that’s what I think, what do you guys think??
