I really enjoyed working with my group this semester. I had only previously known one of my group members, so it was definitely cool to meet new people. Because the majority of us had never met each other before, it was definitely helpful to do the “skills evaluation” at the very beginning of the term to figure out what all of our strengths were.

My group chose Target as our company for the assignments. I’m glad that we made this decision as I’ve always been curious about Target—I wanted to learn more about the company’s marketing strategies before they made their expansion into Canada. Now that we have done all the research and analysis required for the assignments, it will be awesome to be able to see how Target is positioning its push into Canada and understand their reasoning behind it.

My favorite assignment was definitely the video assignment. Not only did it provide us clarity on Target’s four Ps, but it also was cool to get the chance to think critically and make recommendations on how Target should move forward. Even cooler is that since Target is moving in so close to us, we will be able to see whether or not our recommendations align with Target’s future decisions! As well, I was really grateful for the chance to improve my technical videography/graphic design skills for this project. I had always “planned” to sharpen my graphic design skills and learn the details behind videography but this project really pushed me to move forward with that. So, thanks Tamar!

Taking this Intro to Marketing course has definitely been a great experience. I understand now that marketing isn’t just “advertising” and requires much strategic thinking capabilities. Now, I can safely say that I am sure that I will pursue a marketing-related career.

In my last blog post, I talked about the importance of value-added marketing and how traditional marketing techniques are becoming increasing ineffective. While browsing through the course blogroll, I realized that this concept relates strongly to what Devon discusses in his blog post about the challenges of social media. Devon mostly discusses the risks of a company losing control of an ad on social media platforms, but I want to take it to the next level and discuss the very act of placing an ad on social media—is it worth it or not?

Sure, social media seems perfect in theory—it’s cheap and personalizable and can reach a large amount of people. However, web users are so immune to these “one-way” marketing techniques that they can easily filter out this sort of marketing. In fact, Forrester has put out a new digital marketing report, which shows that online banner ads and social marketing ads lie at the bottom of the trust index. In other words, consumers very rarely trust online ads. According to this report, we are also able to see interesting cultural variances that marketers need to be aware of—for example, Europeans are generally more cynical and consistently trust online marketing less that Americans.

It seems as though the promotional part of the marketing mix is definitely more complicated to approach than it was in the past. Consumers today look for value in advertising and decided themselves when and where they engage with brands; it is easy for them to switch in and out of content. Marketers need to recognize this trend and understand that although marketing techniques such as utilizing banner ads on social networking seems great as it can reach many people, it is usually quite ineffective.