Pranita Iyer's Blog

Someone once said, “Did you know that reading the marketing textbook is a good way to procrastinate studying for the accounting midterm?”.
While the message it sends is not very beneficial to students (you MUST study accounting if you want to pass), its not completely untrue. Studying marketing doesn’t just mean that you read the textbook or memorize Tamar’s notes….it has a lot more to do with observing the world.
Observing consumer action/reactions are a major component of how we learn about marketing. Knowing the customer, knowing suppliers and building relationships with them is very important if you want to keep up with the up-and-coming trends and ideas in the business world. This is definitely not something you can learn from a textbook (its a lot more fun than a textbook 😀 ), and is definitely something you need to learn if you want to be successful in the marketing profession.
So the million dollar question is: how does a university student with piling homeworks and midterms galore find the time to notice anything but her textbook?

I leave you with another question: Even though observing consumers is essential to marketing, at what point does a social experiment cross ethical boundaries?

Good night folks <3

Think about how many ads you see around you throughout the year…..okay how about just the ads you saw today. How many of those do you actually remember?? Just the cute ones I bet! Wanna know why??? Because human beings are intensely attracted to very cute things. Its true. Its the very reason for the popularity of that website with the animals falling asleep. And companies use this as a psychological tool to connect with us.

As we learned in class there are four things that influence a consumer’s decision process, or more specifically just the part of the process where they identify their needs. The four things are socio-cultural, situational, Psychological and Marketing Mix (The mix of brands available). When companies put out cute little ads they are trying to appeal to the psychological needs you may have for cuteness.

But does it always work? Telus is known far and wide for its cute ads, but they might not actually work. As trendhunter.com post notes, even though the advertisement is meant to make people want to buy more internet from telus all it does is make them want to own hippopotamuses. A post on the blog AdFreak.com said:

“Canadian ISP Telus has a hit TV commercial on its hands. Trouble is, it’s prompting people to go out and buy toy hippopotamuses, not the company’s Internet services. It’s the song in the ad that has viewers enthralled: a 1950s Gayla Peevey tune called ‘I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.’ Not everyone wants a hippo, the commercial says. Some people want broadband. No, actually they want hippos. Toy hippos—plush, plastic, it doesn’t matter—have been selling like crazy in Calgary. ‘For whatever reason their kids are drawn to this hippo and this song,’ says one owner of a toy store. ‘[Telus has] done animal commercials forever. I’ve never seen anything like this.’

Trendhunter noted that the success of these tactics prompted Bell to come out with its own version of this type of ad, using Canada’s favourite animal: The Beaver

Adfreak is a great blog. To visit it click here.

To visit trendhunter click here.

Well who could have known that an internet provider’s commercial could boost toy and music sales. I guess it just goes to show you that in marketing you need to be careful and aware of the ways your ads can influence people. And that most importantly you need to know your consumer extremely well before putting out an advertisement . And that’s goodbye for today folks. ^.^ Hey Sauder! Jump on it!

(http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/bell-tries-telus-style-marketing-beaver-ads-lousy-but-more-effective)

Hello World indeed!! This is my first ever blog so please bear with me as I start to learn my way around the blogging world. This Blog will be about Marketing Comm 296 and basically anything I see around me that reminds me about marketing.

Our class started off with the question: what is Marketing about? There were murmurs of “manipulation of feelings” and titters of “Sell yourself!!”. Marketing is meant to introduce new products in ways that it manipulates the customer’s feelings and makes them want to buy it. Marketing is an organized process which creates strategies for companies to use, and many times the advertisements that come out at the end of the process become the subjects of an ethics discussion. Knowing all this, one wonders if there aren’t any words to describe it that aren’t so…….well so  nasty. Manipulate??? YUCK!! These are the exact feelings that I left with after those first few classes. And then it came to me :D!!

Everyone knows about the Apple iPad right?? Of course you do. Apple launched a marketing campaign that started LONG before the product even came out. And it got people very hyped up. So much so that Apple sold One million iPads in just 28 days. People were buying them faster than they were being put on the shelves. Here is one little snippet of Apple’s promotional campaign at the Grammy awards (sorry for the bad quality) :

Even months before the product came out we saw it in the hands of many celebrities and on TVs everywhere. that kind of a campaign takes a lot of $$$ money $$$ which for a company as big and established as Apple Macintosh is not a big deal, but what about a smaller company. A smaller company with an equally good or even better product would have a hard time competing with Big-Time firms. Does that mean that they never have the chance to succeed?? just because they don’t have the funds to pay for a large celebrity filled campaign? How could a company like that ever compete against the bigger companies?……..oh wait. I know!!!! MARKETING. Marketing gives you the skills to make a product popular and put it in the hands of consumers even if you don’t have a lot of money to make the campaign. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to manipulate or trick your customers. It simply means that you know how to highlight the best parts of your product so that your customers are able to know how much value they will get. Marketing gives you the opportunity to pave the path to success and prosperity………maybe its not so bad after all ^.^

<3 Pranita