I ran across Jacquelyn Ottman’s green marketing blog today, and one of thoughtful her post named “Responsible Consumption” is the Next Frontier in Green Marketing has evoked my interest. As an expert adviser on green marketing to Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. government, she pointed that it is one thing to design a product to be greener, (such as a dual-flush toilet and cold water detergent),  but the negative environmental impact made throughout a product’s life-cycle cannot be minimized unless the consumer uses and disposes of it responsibly. Only consumers can push the “cold” button on the washing machine or turn off the water when they brush. Thus, a truly green environmentally-friendly marketing requires a shared responsibility of both manufacturers and consumers.

Speaking of the promotion of responsible consumer behavior, I’m proud of our UBC Responsible Consumption which is a student-run, non-profit organization making a great effort to bring the idea of ethical purchasing to campus. As consumers, we impact people and ecosystems on the local and global scale with everything we buy.

UBC Responsible Consumption Week encourages people to consider their effect and presents them with positive, realistic options. For example, in the Responsible Consumption Fair dozens of businesses, non-profits and campus groups who are leaders in sustainability will demonstrate their innovative and inspiring products and services. Besides the fair, RCW hosts many other events including the Bike To School Day. The AMS Bike Co-op challenges students, staff and anyone coming out to campus to ditch their smog box, show some love for mother earth and bring their trusty steed to school. Ride past the corner of Westbrook and University where Co-op volunteers will be handing out free snacks and hot bevvies to all hungry cyclists! Also, mechanics will be on site with basic tools to do a free checkup of bikes. Very thoroughly planed, and people cannot say no to participate!

Maybe we still have a long way to go to fight against irresponsible consumer behavior, but I always believe every small step can make a difference.

As an old brand that has gained market acceptance and are in the maturity stage of it life cycle, M&M’s has made a great effort to remind its consumers and prompt repurchases in various interesting ways.  One of the marketing tactics that has successfully keep customers interested is its introduction of Personalized M&M’s.

For Important Moments in your life

To closely connected with its customers in every possible way, M&M’s introduces the personalized chocolate with your own design of colours, words and images for the special events, such as birthdays and weddings. As shown in the following pictures, M&M’s wedding chocolate candies packed with unique gift bags featuring the newlyweds’ names, faces and wedding date-all in the color combination they have chosen for their big day. The entire design process is anything but complicated. On MY M&M’S® website, customers can start design their own wedding favors, then save them right there on the site. Return and purchase whenever they are ready, also they can always come back and change their saved design, since M&M’s understands how important the big day is, and they are ready to help make it perfect-right down to the tiniest, most delicious detail.

For Business

Personalized M&M’s also integrate its fun and chic brand image with a more mature and professional message sent to the public. People can wow their customers/business partners with a special business card which is sweet and delicate. Use properly, it could be a way to be remembered and stand out from crowd, especially for Realtors, direct sales representatives, and other professionals for whom personal relationship with customers is important for their career success. By designing personalized chocolate candies for working professionals, M&M’s has not only enhanced customers’ perception of the values that they believe M&M’s can provide them with, but significantly increase the brand awareness for a even larger population of potential consumers.

Humor in advertising is definitely an art. When done right, it always works really really well! Some of the most memorable advertising campaigns in recent history, regardless of company size and marketing budget, and whether broadcast, print or online-only, have involved humor.As an audience myself, I always find myself most enjoy being entertained instead of pitched. Based on my personally experience, appealing to the products emotionally can effectively lead to further engagement with the products in the future. According to a 1993 Journal of Marketing study that examined multinational effects of humor on advertising (a study that still stands true), the major conclusion was that “humor is more likely to enhance recall, evaluation, and purchase intention when the humorous message coincides with ad objectives, is well-integrated with those objectives, and is viewed as appropriate for the product category. Under such circumstances, humorous advertising is more likely to secure audience attention, increase memorability, overcome sales resistance, and enhance message persuasiveness.” When executed properly, humor helps cut through the noise and helps you stand out. If you can make someone laugh, there is an emotional connection with them. And anything you say beyond that is going to be more meaningful.

Writing a great piece of humor is no simple task.I agree that an effective ad needs to convey valuable purchasing information and specifics to its potential customers,  but I also find out the campaigns that failed to get my attention, as well as many other people’s  were usually trying to include too much product messaging. Many companies that simply are not willing to take a risk by being a little bit edgy. If you are safe, your results are most likely to be average. Maybe it’s when you take a chance that something can become really big. Hope the following examples of witty outdoor advertisements can make you smile while thinking about the products.

Builds Strong Teeth

.http://www.webdesigncore.com/2011/01/21/creative-funny-outdoor-advertisement-designs

The Real Milkshake

http://www.designzzz.com/hilarious-effective-funny-outdoor-advertisements/

Everyone/thing loves Pepsi

http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/pepsi_straws?size=_original

Cemex: quick dying concrete

http://www.designzzz.com/hilarious-effective-funny-outdoor-advertisements/

As Cecilia introduced in her interesting post “Don’t underestimate cheap marketing“, marketing tactics that make innovative use of limited financial resources can be very effective. When times are challenging, small business has to maximize results and get the most from every direct marketing dollar. . Learning from the simple, original, and effective marketing campaign conducted by Guangyin Yoga Club (which costs £74 in total),  I think the following two aspects can make a big difference for low budget marketing.

• Make It Memorable

You don’t have to host a bungee jumping contest to stand out. The owner of  San Francisco mission-district restaurant, Casa Sanchez, came up with this idea: offering free lunch for life to anyone who got a tattoo of their Jimmy the Corn Man logo. Through the course of the promotion, 39 people were willing to be tattooed with the sombrero-wearing mariachi boy riding a blazing corn cob. Associated Press, LA Weekly, USA Today and local TV stations were among the media that picked up the story, affording the restaurant extensive coverage for what was essentially a free promotion.

• Get Customers Involved

Also, the best way to motivate customers for very little money is to get them involved on an emotional or experiential level. Here’s a great example featuring a familiar product. The LifeSavers five-flavor pack has been around for years, and the company has consistently studied consumer response to each individual flavor. But it wasn’t until LifeSavers considered phasing out its pineapple flavor that it turned research into a highly effective promotion.LifeSavers set up a special Web site and toll-free number asking customers to vote to keep pineapple or replace it with strawberry or watermelon. When more than 1 million passionate responses were tallied overall, the pineapple flavor was saved from extinction. LifeSavers got tremendous publicity from media reports on the company’s responsiveness to the overwhelming public demand. And LifeSavers energized its customer base with an extremely low-cost promotion, when compared with what it would have paid to gain the equivalent number of gross impressions through advertising or any other marketing means.

Marketing doesn’t have to cost a lot to have a big impact. The challenge lies in making your promotion memorable, consistent with your company image, closely linked to your product or service and above all, being motivational.

Whether Apple fans or not, you must have heard the new generation of iPad has been introduced to the world last week. As I read posts on our class blog wondering what to post myself, I ran across Xue Zhang’s post about the new iPad 2 announcement called “Is the Tablet Market Anything Beyond the iPad? So Far the Answer is NO!” and it reminds me of the concepts of innovation and value learnt in class.

With Steve Jobs taking the stage at Apple’s mega announcement, he revealed this magical wonder of iPad 2.o which is lighter, thinner, and full of great ideas. As we may all have learned, the new features of iPad 2.o include the much expected dual-cameras—with camera-focused apps like FaceTime, iMovie, and Photo Booth, the thin new contour, 3-axis gyroscope, and the 1GHz dual-core A5 chip which has drastically faster graphics processing.

We all know about Apple’s amazingly great products and services, but I think the most lasting legacy about Apple is being an an incredible engine of innovation with profitable growth. Apple has become a cult of personality. Steve Jobs, who seems to me to be more like a leader than a manager, has done a great job to lead the consumers, to build an enduring organization that will sustain itself long into the future beyond the tenure of the people that made it successful. Leading the consumer is one of Steve Jobs’ great strengths. In an interview shortly after the iPad was released in spring 2010, Jobs was asked what consumer and market research Apple did to guide the development of the iPad. He answered, “None, it’s not the job of the consumer to know what they want.” Thus it’s marketers job to find the products, the services, or new values that consumers don’t know they need yet. On the basis of emerging trends, insight into customer needs, and an instinctive understanding about what people want,  a new-to-the-world product can be adopted by as many consumers as possible and have prolonged life cycle hopeful during the stages of grow and maturity.

Students at the University of South Carolina (USC) are being given the chance to do a course on Lady Gaga starting in spring 2011.  The sociology degree, Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame, will focus on the star’s rise to fame. According to the course’s website, students look at the role that business and marketing strategies and new media have played in Lady Gaga’s career. Gay culture, religious and political themes, sex and sexuality, and the cities of New York and Hollywood also come under the spotlight. According to Professor Mathieu Deflem, who lead the course, this course is not about persona or music Lady Gaga, but more emphasis on the fact that the popularity of Lady Gaga makes it has 10 million followers in the up and six million in Twitter. It is a social phenomenon!

source: life.globaltimes.cn

Like her or not, you have to admit that she is different. She’s unlike the stereotypical song performer in that she is not played up by her looks. I guess one could say that Lady Gaga is the Elizabeth Bennet of the 21st century, in that she epitomizes the social climate of the age. It might be a little far-fetched, but when you watch Lady Gaga`s videos you get a strong, vibrant sense that you know exactly the type of audience she has and the type of society she is trying to depict: fast-paced, superficial, alert, fragmented, borderline cubic (but life as the engine of a society should be continuous, fluid, never one-sided and most certainly never superfluous).

Lady Gaga on her queer button hat (source: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn)

In many of her songs, Gaga uses her odd-ball theatrical presence to its full extent to shock, creep-out and fascinate the viewers. I may not fully understand the occult meaning behind her queer sense of fashion and exaggerated theatrical presence, I appreciate her courage and talent to play with the public, to play with fame. And thanks to Lady Gaga, artists are starting to dress much more crazy, more out there even on the Oscar red carpet.

source:http://www.foxnewsz.com

As I learn more about marketing, I suddenly realized how close the relationship between me and marketing is. Those purchasing decisions I  use to be proudly considered to be self-determined  and free to follow my own inclination are actually so heavily influenced by ubiquitous advertisements which are specifically designed to communicate with me (as one member in the target market) in a specific way.

Think about how we make decision as small as what to drink  after an exciting game. Beverage giants Coca Cola and Pepsi have vigorously competed for share of voice, share of heart and share of throat for decades. In the case of Coke Zero and Pepsi Max, they are chasing a burgeoning market of men who apparently aren’t man enough to own up to drinking a soda marked “diet.” As our textbook mentioned, in order to communicate the value of new product — Caffeine-Free, low calories coke and promote it against a “girly” drink, they specifically targeted men through its fast-paced TV commercials, out-door advertising and the dark, bold colours.

Coke Zero centered its brand media strategy on four key pillars: sports, social media, schools and Spanish language media. The marketer secured prominent advertising placements in and around college basketball, college football and Nascar. Over 70% of Coke Zero’s TV commercials ran on CBS, many during coverage of the NCAA basketball March Madness season. Also Coca-Cola Zero’shome page was at one point devoted entirely to its “Playbook Challenge” game and contest. College football fans could win prizes by making quick decisions about how they would respond to a variety of dilemmas that fans would potentially face at a game.

On the other hand,Pepsi Max’s plan had a more traditional media flavor to it, delivering strong audiences for the advertising . And it did a smart job leveraging Doritos’ early buzz for the Super Bowl.Here’s the very latest on the Coke / Pepsi war as a remake of the original Pepsi vs Coke commercial from 1995 – today it’s Pepsi MAX versus Coke Zero. Pepsi has done a great job at integrating technology advances in this version and the clip ends with a funny twist. Enjoy!

Today is Feb 4th, which means we are only 10 days away from what some believe is the world second most gifted holiday and second largest retailing event of the year! Some people argue that Valentine’s Day IS all about marketing. Similar to any commercial holidays, it  is just another way to create a buzz out of what was otherwise just another ordinary day. Humans catch this fever, and it causes them to do something that’s actually quite absurd – go out and BUY THINGS they DON’T NEED. However, from my perspective, Valentine is fun, even you don’t have a sweetheart.

Tonight when I searched the Internet trying to find out something to write for my marketing blog, i ran across the following two cute kitchen ware design which I think are perfect  gift for Valentine’s Day.

The first one is a stainless steel fried egg device. You can make various shaped fried eggs for your beloved. A little change in his/her breakfast can really make a big different. Plus, love is all about small little things in everyday life, isn’t it?

renren.com

A toaster that toasts your words seems to me to be a great idea. Having trouble getting your message across to your beloved one after a quarrel? Or do you find that your husband often forgets, well, everything? Why not put your message on his/her breakfast? I’m not suggesting you get some strange alphabetic cereal, you can brand your important messages on a slice of toast with this utterly bizarre design from Sasha Tseng. It incorporates a little message board where one can write quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself. It seems to only be a concept as yet, but fingers crossed it gets made and you can  make your beloved smile for the romantic  good morning notes on the toast or make his/her spit out their morning coffee with your hilarious quips. How sweet would that be!

source:http://www.yankodesign.com/2007/09/06/honey-i-left-it-on-the-toast/

Here is a question that has bothered me for quite a long time. Why have I always found myself in possession of unwanted beauty products or magazine subscriptions? As long as I can recall, I have always been an easy mark for the pitches of peddlers, sales operators, and fund-raisers.  Is this because I’m really an easy push-over or there are some super effective strategies to persuade people say YES and end up buying things we don’t really need/like?

On Tuesday’s class,Elaine mentioned the effectiveness of various kinds of free samples offered by Costco as a method to influence consumers’ purchase decision. Waite a minute, I was offered a cute little pocket book when I subscribed  the magazine called Golf for the whole year (I’ve never played golf in my entire life). It seems that almost every time when I felt the pressure that I probably should buy this product, there was always a nice salesperson with a  sample (which sometimes is not attractive to me at all) saying “take it. it’s just a gift for you”. There must be some connections between those free samples and  the successful sale.

As we discussed on Tuesday’s class, consumer decision making process can be influenced by psychological factors such as motives, attitudes, and perceptions. Those internal factors shape the way consumes receive marketer’s message.  However, experienced compliance practitioners understand people’s mind so well that they know how to trigger and engage consumers in the way of thinking they want. In Dr. Robert B. Cialdini’s  super interesting book called Influence: the psychology of persuasion, he described the rule of reciprocation. In effect, we are often prompted to repay what someone has given us. When given the pocket book, I felt indebted to the giver. This indebtedness made me feel compelled to cancel the debt even when it against better judgement. I told myself maybe I should learn golf to cover the fact that I didn’t want the magazine. The rule of reciprocation assures that someone can give something away first, with the relative assurance that this initial gift will eventually be repaid–nothing is lost.

When it comes to UGG boots you will find there are two fairly solid and distinct groups of people. Either you are a fan of them or you are a harsh opponent of them. But the question remains, what group of people are correct? Are UGGs really the most comfortable footwear? Or are they just a ridiculous fad that most people will look back onto in ten years and wonder what they were thinking?

source:http://jtwoo.blogspot.com/2010/12/finally-cure-for-ugg-boots.html

One thing that can hint at the answer to this question about UGG boots is to look at the history of what we now call UGG boots. It goes back to World War I when aviators wore them, as due to their great insulation properties they were perfect to keep their tootsies warm. Also, in Australia, UGGs have been worn by sheep shears and surfers for many decades. Interestingly, the name comes from “Ugly” boots.

Who would imagine that boots which were never intended to be worn in front of other people for the shear shame of their UGGly appearance would become an item of high fashion amongst people around the world? Well, like anything in our modern society it is all about how people market the product. From my perspective, UGGs’ great success can be attributed to its warmth and effective marketing strategy. After acquired UGG Boots, Deckers Outdoor Corporation established the brand’s positioning and sustained its authenticity as functional footwear, but also a high-end premium, luxury collection. Besides building a carefully-planned brand image, it took effective advantage of celebrity effect. In 2000, Oprah Winfrey, Americas most powerful and popular presenter was sent a pair of UGGs and she loved them so much that she featured the Ultra UGG Boots on her “Oprah’s Favourite Things’ slot, which gave the boots a massive endorsement probably the best that UGG could have gotten and immediately the boots became a “must have item” for Americans. From then on the sheepskin boots were to be found on the runways in Paris, New York and Milan. High fashion and ultra comfort all rolled into one! Once the customer loyalty to UGG’s heritage (functionality, quality& comfort) has established, the brand occupies a meaningful and distinct competitive position in customers’ mind, and therefore prolongs UGG’s popularity.