Category: Marketing

After reading several different posts from various marketing blogs, the one that caught my attention the most was from the Influential Marketing Blog, mainly because it mentioned some ideas that I have certainly thought about during Comm 296.

1. Minimalism. Personally, I prefer those products or services that have straight-forward advertising campaigns, as well as a clear marketing mix. I always choose minimalism over maximalism. Advertising should be honest and unambiguous, companies should give what they offer and packaging should be plain and explicit. I would say Apple is the company that best suits this description.

2. Having more options is not necessarily better. Economics tends to state that a larger number of brands for the same product will increase market competition, and so benefit the consumer in the long term. I partly disagree. Personally, I dislike going to a clothing store to find about twenty different types of jeans. I am aware that more brands means that the price becomes competitive, but to be honest I would rather choose between three or four options, and not from twenty. Mainly because if I am not fully satisfied with my final decision, my sense of regret afterwards will be very high. In any case, I can barely tell the difference between most brands.

3. Benefits are crucial. If there is one main idea that you learn in Comm 296, that is the following: costumers do not buy features, they buy benefits. As mentioned in the blog post, one of Blackberry’s competitive advantages is their physical keyboard. In terms of usage, applications, and features, they cannot really compete with other smartphones, such as the iPhone. However, RIM has managed to succeed without really heavily advertising this feature. Some customers consider this benefit invaluable, and that is the key of their success. No advertising is really necessary.

After reading many classmates’ blogs, I finally found Amanda’s post and I thought it was really interesting. She talks about honesty in marketing and how it can affect the image of a certain product or brand. In my opinion, I like the idea of having an honest world but I know that achieving that is near impossible, especially when there is so much competitiveness everywhere. Marketing is certainly one of the places in which I wouldn’t expect much honesty, because let’s face it: most times it’s about winning, not about transparency.

While doing some research on transparent marketing, I stumbled upon Domino’s Pizza campaign called “Domino’s Pizza Turnaround”, which was all about being honest with the consumers. The first step was accepting that their pizza was, basically, horrible. In the video we can see people in focus groups complaining about various features, describing the crust as ‘cardboard’ and the sauce as ‘ketchup’. As a result, they decided to redesign their recipe in an attempt to make a better product.

We will never be sure if Domino’s chose this marketing strategy because they wanted to make a real change or because they couldn’t hide the fact that their product was terrible anymore. Anyways, I’m really glad that we can see some transparent marketing once in a while.

If you want to know how customers reacted to the new recipe, watch this video.