The marketing plan assignment is a team project that we have to complete with in a group setting. At the beginning of the school year, we are asked to choose a company that we would like to work with, and our team chose Coca-Cola. This project was divided into 4 assignments. The first and the second assignment asked us to use what we learn in class to summarize a SWOT table, a marketing mix, STP and other factors that can influence a company’s success. The third assignment is to make a video to present our ideas to both our classmates and our professor. The last assignment is to evaluate our classmate’s video.

Since this is our first time to make a video, so we have a lot of stuff that we have to learn. The first thing is how can we write a story line that is not too boring and uncreative. After hours of thinking and eliminating, I finally have an idea of how our story line should look like. I have to thank Domino Pizza for providing this awesome idea to me. In their advertisement, they record what customers said about their products, and then they improved their product. After watching this ads, I thought that we could first identify a problem, and then do a survey from “actual” consumers, and at the end we can provide a result of how to deal with the problem. Once we had a story line, the next step is to actually film the video. But here comes the second problem, none of us have filmed before, so we don’t know which angle should we place the camera, and how we should set up the scene. Luckily enough, we all watched a lot of movie which can give us ideas of how we should film. When we resolved this problem, the next appeared, which is we don’t know how to act as a actor or actress. So we decided not to see this video project as a assignment, instead we take this as an opportunity to polish our acting skills. Thus, we were able to act naturally infront of cameras. The last and also the biggest problem that we encounter was how to edit our video. Fortunately,  Sauder was able to provide us with expert support for video editing. Under the help of video editing expert, we were finally able to finish our video.

During the video making process, we encounter numerous problems, but we were able to solve them and learnt new skills from it. I think we did a pretty good job for this assignment, because we really put a lot of effort into it. The things that we did well in this project is that we have a very humorous story line, and we had a lot of effects in the video which makes it more enjoyable when watching. Also, I think in terms of creativity, we also did a splendid job. However, there are still room for us to improve next time. Although our video is humorous and creative, but from a marketing perspective, I think it lack some sort of professionalism, that is it is not professional enough in terms of the content. Also, there are some minor parts that we could work on next time, such as grammar, the way we shot our video and have a stronger content. Overall, I think we did a pretty good job in this project, and the experience is very enjoyable and fun.

At last, I would like to thank our professor Rui Silva for providing this opportunity for us to learn new skills that we would not learn otherwise and also for providing this awesome opportunity for us to make friends, which can be a life time asset.

After reading the inspiring blog that Michael Brenner wrote about how should marketers market through advertising, I found myself couldn’t agree with him more. As he said in the blog that several years ago, David Ogilvy advised marketers that content is more important than the way that the message send out to potential customers. I think this is a good advise because more and more people have paid more attention on the content of a advertisement than the form of the advertisement. An advertisement will be a good advertisement as long as it has good content. The form it uses will not affect much of the success of the adversement. If this is true, then marketers should mainly focus on how to make good content in an advertisement instead of thinking which form of advertisement is more attractive.

I also agree with Michael for his lessons to marketers. One of his lesson says that content marketing that seeks to meet customer needs is now more important than ever. As we learnt in class that marketing nowadays is value driven, that is companies should add value to their product so customers can get extra values from purchasing the product. The same concept applies to advertisement, so the advertisement that can fulfill customer’s needs would be perceived better. Thus, I think instead of thinking fancy forms of advertisement, marketers should put their energy into creating more meaningful contents.

At the end of Michael’s blog, he referenced GE’s CMO Beth Comstock’s quote “it almost doesn’t matter who produces this content, as long as it’s good.” This point is good in the way that content is more important. However, I think marketers should beaware the ethical issue, that is although content is important in the process of marketing, but the content has to be real. It can have some degree of exaggeration, but it can not reach the degree which it becomes deceptive information.

In conclusion, the content is more important than the form of advertisement, however, the content has to be real, or within the acceptable degree of exaggeration.

The original site: http://www.b2bmarketinginsider.com/strategy/advertising-leaders-consider-content-over-advertising

This blog post will focus on which market does Winco supermarket targets by linking and commenting on Paul’s blog.

Blog #3 – The marketing strategy of Winco supermarket

I agree with Paul that Winco is targeting Vancouverites other than US consumers. As Paul mentioned in his blog, many Vancouverite would shop in Bellingham because of the price and tax difference. As my personal experience, the price in Bellingham is indeed a lot cheap than the price in Vancouver. In addition, the tax rate is 8.6% and 12% respectively. This extra 3.4% in tax rate was able to justify the difference in exchange rate. Moreover, the gas in Bellingham is also cheaper than Vancouve. However, despite the benefits of shopping and gasing in Bellingham, there are still a lot of people not very interested in driving and shopping in Bellingham. The biggest reason is that it took a lot of time for a round trip, and there is no point of doing this when people are living alone or live in a house of two. Thus, to be more specific, I think Winco supermarket is targeting Vancouverite who have a family of four or more, and who are willing to spend a lot of time driving and shopping.

Although I agree with Paul that Winco supermarket is targeting Vancouverites, but I don’t think that Winco is going to snatch a great portion of the market from Costco for the following reasons. First, Winco and Costco are targeting different segments. For example, Costco is targeting people who has a small restaurant or who has a huge family that needs lots of same material at a time. These kinds of people would choose Costco over Winco because Costco would have a better deal than Winco. Second, although Winco have a comparative advantage for its hours of operation, but Costco on the other hand have a comparative advantage for people who purchase electronic goods in its store, because it provides two year extended warrantee to its customers. Last, Costco is a type of store which you can basically buy everything, but you cannot do that in Winco. So overall, I think Winco might steal some portion of Costco’s customer, but it will not a huge impact on the market share that Costco has.

As a result of the highly competitive market today, companies seek ways to add value to its customer. Having the best “hardware” is no longer the ultimate goal, instead, better “software” are what companies pursuing nowadays. Take airline industry as an example, every airline can have the best planes, but not all airlines can offer fantastic service to customers. Let’s look how Southwest Airline add value to its customer.

Southwest Airline is not a huge airline comparing to other airlines in the United State. However, Southwest has the lowest number of complaints among all U.S. airlines, it consistently received the fewest ratio of complaints per passenger boarded of all major U.S. carriers since 1987. How is it possible for a middle size airline company achive such big success? The answer lies on the value that the company delivered to its customer.

People who travelled a lot will notice that no matter which airline you flight with in U.S., when you pay a fee to check a luggage. However, Southwest decided not to charge customer for luggage when they flight with the airline. In addition, Southwest offers free in-flight non-alcoholic beverages to customer who flight with the company. More importantly, flight attendent of Southwest have their unique way of announcing safety information by making them into songs, jokes or raps, which can entertain their customer. Lastly, Southwest offers a frequent-flyer program to benefit customer who flies a lot with the company, this program helps the company to maintain its customer loyalty.

As a conclusion, the reason why Southwest Airline was able to achive its success because they add value to its customer by offering free luggage check-in, free non-alcholic beverages, entertaining way of announcing safety information and reward program to benefit frequent flyers.

Southwest Airline rap

The term “Franchise” is not an unfamiliar term to most of us, because it is one of the well known model of operation. Huge companies like McDonald, KFC and Coca-Cola all use some sort of franchise techniques in their operation. However, the reason behind it might not be as clear as it seems to people. Now let me explain it in detail.

There are several reasons why a company wish to employ the franchise model as a part of their operation. The first is that by using the franchise model, it allows the company to expand faster than opening company-owned stores. The model is also cheaper to operate, because it cost the parent company less when new stores are owned and operated by a third party. As a result, the parent company have much more money to invest on other stuff, such as advertisement.

Another reason is that the franchise model allows the company to understand its customer in different regions better. Let’s take Coca-Cola as an example. Coca-Cola actively looking for bottling partner(s) in the particular region that the campany wants to expand its market in. By choosing a local bottling partner(s), it saves a lot of time, effort and money as well for Coca-Cola to try to understand the local customer. As we discussed in class, failing to understand the local customer, may result in a total failure in expanding the market in that region.

However, there are also pitfalls in the franchise model. One pitfall is that, the model limits the company’s potential growth, because the parent company will only earn a percentage of the revenues of each franchise store. Despite the fact the model restricts the company’s growth, but in the long run, I think it benefits the company more than it costs the company.

Many companies used advertisement as their method to market their products. There is nothing wrong with marketing products through advertisement, but using misleading informations or even fraud informations is a totally different story.

We all have had the experience of feeling disappointed at a product which we brought purely because of its advertisement. The disappointment comes from the expectations we hold for the product which was from the advertisement. In reality, most of the product differ from the one they advertised, this is because of the misleading information that used in the advertisement. Thus, in my point of view, using misleading informations is not only wrong, but also unethical. For example, in June 2012, Apple was fined $2.25m for misleading advertisement. When Apple introduced its latest iPad in Australia, the advertisement had implied that the iPad WiFi + 4G could directly connect to the local LTE network provided by Telstra in Australia. But apparently, the new iPad was unable to do that. Thus, Apple has been fined for not compliant with the Australian consumer law.

By using misleading informations in the advertisement can indeed increase the sale of the product. But it will damage the relationship between the customer and the company by lying to them. In the worst case, the company might lost customer loyalty which is so hard to build. In Apple’s case, the misleading advertisement helped to increase the sales volume in Australia, but at the same time, it also lost its customer loyalty in Australia. In addition, Apple has to offer a serie of customer benefit to Australians in order to maintain its market share in Australia. Therefore, in my opinion, misleading advertisement is not a good idea to practice, and it is unethical, because the advertisement lies to the customer.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/21/apple-fined-ipad-4g-australia

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