Marketing

Due to mid terms and several project deadlines, I decided to put this blog in the cupboard for a while. But now that the schedule is easing up, I would like to say that I’m still critical about Marketing and it has often been the least of my interest and aside from being overly busy to even write a blog on marketing, I simply dislike the way marketing is conducted much less blog about it. Maybe that is because I’m not a seller.

In essence, marketing aims to create a relation between brand/product and certain needs. Much of marketing feels like psychology, except that it is in the applied form. At times there are several good marketing campaigns that I’ve come acrossed, but recently it seems as though that it is no longer about the product. I often feel chased after by certain marketing campaigns. It appears to have gone from a focus of fufiling needs to creating needs. What makes it more detestable is that certain marketers are so focused on selling a product that they ignore the customers needs.

Youtube is an example of a business focused on marketing. The video playback function is great for anyone to use but the true value of the business lies in the statistics of the people who are watching the videos. Similarly for facebook. Here is link of how YouTube can be used for marketing http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7193/How-to-Use-YouTube-s-Analytics-for-B2B-Marketing.aspx

Social sites are huge in the marketing business now, they are able to collect data fast on enormously large number of the population. From the data, one can easily identify segment groups and understand the common areas between certain groups and such. I must admit, it is valuable data, for businesses looking for customers. But whether or not the information is used for purposeful marketing or just another selling frenzy is another story.

I was browsing funny advertisements and came across an advertisement by Burger King. The advertisement shows a Burger King agent stealing information from Macdonalds. Their Sausage McMuffin with Egg.

I believe BK is trying to penetrate deeper into the market by selling one of Mac’s favourite, also my favourite, products.

The advertisement is admitting that and is instead focused on the lower price that a BK Breakfast Muffin (Essentially the same as a Sausage McMuffin with Egg) is compared to the substitute at Macs.

I’m sold. The next time i’m looking for a Sausage McMuffin with Egg…besides Macdonalds, I’ll be looking for the Burger King Logo. Not many ways you can differentiate such a product. Price seems to be dominant.

Oh my, apparently Burger King has a breakfast menu!

Interesting that I was so quick to add Burger King into my list of fastfood breakfast. Seems that it is not that easy as I thought to differentiate yourself in the fastfood business.

I was reading Jason Heng’s post on his marketing blog about tribe-oriented marketing.

Instead of simply creating value and allow any consumer to associate themselves with the value, marketeers are now creating groups or ‘tribes’ that share or want a number of certain values.

People can be categorized on several levels.

One of these levels are their values and believes. Targeting values is difficult because there are so many different values that people have. What tribe oriented marketing can do is targets the group of values and ideas instead of targeting individual values and ideas.

This is quite apparent in a number of marketing campaigns today, such as Apple. The important point is that tribe-oriented marketing can focus on one category or group or tribe, but because this is a higher level of categorization, a large number of values and ideas can be associated with it.

Why are sweets and small items right by the cashier? Why are some over priced item outselling a similar item of lesser cost. Why do people buy items only to realize that they do not need it. Why do some products have such intense loyalty?

Marketing is really about finding the “buy button” of consumers. A field of marketing that studies consumers’ behavior to marketing stimuli. Heavy research utilizing technologies such as functional MRI & electroencephalography (EEG) to measure changes in activity in the brain and many more. It is common for marketers to approach a passerby only to be greeted with a “no thank you” before anything is said. Wouldn’t it be great if people came up to the marketer and ask more about what they are selling? Neuromarketing explores this.

Neuromarketing will tell the marketer what consumer reacts to, it could be color, sound or something more subtle like the idea that having this product puts one above another.

More @ http://www.businessknowhow.com/marketing/neuromarketing.htm

It always does.

Guys want to be with sexy girls, and girls want to be like sexy girls. In general.

Marketing never ceases to amaze me, even though it feels like an exploitation, I cannot disagree on its effectiveness and at times, it makes me chuckle.

Above is one of Carl’s Junior advertisement for their salads. When the campaign was still active, a customer could win a chance to have a ‘online date’ with the very desirable Kim Kardashian.

Just how useful are marketing trends? Does it belong in the same category as other indicators in situation analysis?

Trends are lagging indicators and often happen or identified after the fact. Hoping on to the trend bandwagon have at times been shown to be a bad move.

If anyone recall Sony’s Minidisc product line of Minidiscs and MD players. It was an up and coming product until boom, digital took over and my friends were selling their relatively new MD players for Mp3 players instead.

There was another such episode of the “Pet Rock”, it was advertised as the pet who never disobeys and just sits there waiting for your love. It was literally a rock and received much attention. But no other such products followed or if they did, wasn’t successful. As it died down very shortly as rocks were soon realized to be unable to replace the adorable puppies.

I think there is a distinction between trends and fads, the latter of which the 2 examples above fall into.