This is my second group-working project here at Sauder. The team is as diverse as I expected. Three of us are local, Briana, Adrian and Ali, and the rest three are international, Zoey, Katherine and me. Each one of us has different cultural backgrounds and personalities, and this diversity brought us a variety of ideas, especially during the brainstorming stage of every assignment. Working with people with different strengths and a diverse span of knowledge made everything much easier: there was always at least one of us had some knowledge to deal with the problem we encountered.

However, the project was quiet challenging and we had a “do-over” in the middle of the project. The entire thing was fine at first. But the further we extend on the project, the more problem exposed. We failed to finish the project with our original segment: the segment was not specific enough for us to develop the marketing mix. We spent an entire week discussing about the new segment and settled on Toyota’s pick-up trucks. Although the final assignment turn out to be quiet good, I think we should have picked a segment that we are more familiar to so that we will be able to dig into this segment a bit deeper.

Overall, I truly enjoyed this team experience and it was really nice to make friends with all of my team members. Nevertheless, I wish we have spent more time and efforts on the first stage of the project. In that way, we would have a solid start and a deeper understanding of Toyota, which would enable us to avoid the “do-over”.

A fellow classmate Laura Ryu wrote about how outlet stores can dilute the brand due to the fact that “the consumers with higher income sees less value in their products when they see consumers with lower income, such as teenagers, using the same products.” Nevertheless, I believe that with proper management, an outlet will not hurt a luxury brand’s reputation. In fact, outlets can even help a brand on the brand-expansion side.

Younger generations, who are not able to afford luxury brands at current stage of their lives, are a crucial target or a group of potential consumers for luxury brands. Outlets can help reach this segment because of their entry-level products at lower price points. These entry-level products such as beauty items and fragrances can help luxury brands establish life-long connections with customers at a young age. Also, selling last season’s items at a discount rate in the outlets is a good way to get rid of excess products and attracting a significant amount of new consumers in the same time.

However, outlets can really hurt the brand if they are not run correctly. The management level should be very careful when opening an outlet. Many things are needed to be taken into consideration, for example, location. If luxury brands choose to open an outlet store, they should do so where other luxury brands already have outlets as to not devalue the brand. Selling older products, instead of creating new ones specifically for an outlet, could also help a luxury brand maintain its status.

Original Blog:Outlet Stores: Is it a benefit?

Whether promoting products or pitching services, every business needs to advertise in order to establish connections with new, paying customers. When it comes to spending their marketing dollars, the possibilities are abundant and range from traditional print media to digital advertising.

This blog made the argument that online advertisement outperforms traditional ads. While I agree with the some of the advantages the writer mentioned that online advertising has over traditional methods, I believe that reading online may not be as effective or rewarding as the printed word.

One such study, published in 2008 in the Journal of Research in Reading, reveals that Physical manipulation (such as scrolling) distracts our focus from what we are reading, and the lack of physical dimension also seems to interfere. Print advertising is absorbed in a linear and user-controlled manner. People usually spend less time on each page when reading on tablets and computers comparing to when reading on printed materials. People using digital devices tend to tap, mouse, scroll, and swipe as they skip from screen to screen fairly rapidly.

                                                          Furthermore, unlike Internet and Television advertisements, which flash before our eyes and disappear in 15 to 30 seconds, printed advertisements stay on the page. This allows people who are interested in the advertisement to take a second look at the content of the ads and therefore increases the probability for them to actually make a purchase. A single ad in a single magazine may promote a product or service for months or even years before someone places the magazine in the trash. No other advertising method provides that much potential longevity from a single investment.

Original Blog:  http://www.examiner.com/article/how-online-advertising-is-outperforming-traditional-ads

Start-ups and small businesses are always looking for more customers, and more and more of them are choosing to reach their potential customers through the Internet. One of the most popular choices is obviously advertising on Facebook, the largest social media platform. However, is Facebook advertising a good value proposition for marketers? Facebook’s strategy is based on the premise that “social” is the future of the online advertising business. It’s the idea that recommendations from friends and companies alike are going to be more effective than traditional display advertising at driving consumer behavior.

Yes, Facebook Ads can work. But there are different types of ads, and certain types work better for some marketers than others do. Facebook ad click-through varies dramatically across sector:

Although advertisements in some of the sectors, such as Finance and News, have lower click-through rate, overall the ads are growing more effective over time. The first annual Social Media Intelligence report released Monday by Adobe found that Facebook’s ad clicks, ad impressions and advertisers’ return on investment were all higher in 2013 than in 2012. According to the study, which took into account more than 131 billion Facebook ad impressions and 4.3 billion social engagements, Facebook ads were clicked 29% more often in 2013, and the return to investors was 58% higher than last year.

Facebook marketing is the “must” of the social media marketing world. B2B and B2C alike can benefit from the increased branding, customer loyalty, organic SEO and general digital footprint. Ignoring Facebook means ignoring over 1 billion users that are potential customers and no business is too successful to ignore that many untapped prospects.

Procter & Gamble found that it is much easier to sell more to people who are already using its brand than it is to convert them from a competitor. However, customers are more demanding than ever and loyalty seems to be dead to them. From a customer perspective, it is also difficult for me to find a business that provides such a good product or service that I would never price-shop and declare my brand loyalty across my social network when facing so many choices. Such perspective generated Customer Loyalty Program.

Customer Loyalty Program is a serious business for airlines, hotel chains, and credit-card companies. But the one we are encountering in our day-to-day life is provided by markets, such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Save On Foods. The most common loyalty program methodology used by these markets is Simple Point System. Kendal Peiguss defined this system in one of his studies: Frequent customers earn points, which translate into some type of reward. Whether it’s a discount, a freebie, or special customer treatment, customers work toward a certain amount of points to redeem their reward. Where many companies falter in this method, however, is making the relationship between points and tangible rewards complex and confusing. Fifteen points equals one dollar, and twenty dollars earns 50% off your next purchase and so on. These are not rewards, they are headache. Barely anyone has time to calculate these points and be loyal to the business just because of these “loyalty rewards”, while businesses are still complaining that Customer Loyalty is dead.

Customer Loyalty is not dead. It is just that the businesses have not done enough to “wake it up”.

Thomas Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University conducted an experiment by giving three- to five-year-olds two portions of identical foods, one set out on a McDonald’s wrapper. When children were asked to point out which foods tasted better, surprisingly, for hamburgers, French fries, baby carrots, milk or juice in a cup, kids would say the one on the McDonald’s wrapper tastes better. This is how advertising to children builds up brand loyalty.

This marketing strategy is unethical, though might be efficient. Children are vulnerable to commercials. Kids under the age of five cannot even recognize the difference between a television show and a commercial – the line between content and advertising is completely invisible to them. Children under the age of eight do not understand the motives of marketers and cannot resist persuasive claims. However, just because they do not recognize the advertisements for what they are does not mean that these commercials do not affect them. Marketing and advertising have massive power to shape children’s thinking and preferences, and therefore can easily build up children’s brand loyalty. This explains why kids from the previous experiment preferred food wrapped in McDonald’s packaging.

Dr. Victor Strasburger, an author of an American Academy of Pediatrics policy urging limits on marketing to children, states that the study illustrates how marketers attempt to “brand younger and younger children, to instill in them an almost obsessional desire for a particular brand-name product.” I believe that an ethical solution to this issue would be keeping children, who are lack of the cognitive skills and life experiences to recognize the persuasive intent of commercials, or to be more specifically, children under eight-year-old, away from all kinds of advertisements.

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