Tim Tse's Blog

Companies are trying hard to penetrate through the barriers that lie between consumers and the product. Normally TV ads are good enough to promote the awareness of a product. But nowadays, companies often target daily computer users and would rather promote online than on TV. While everyone’s still discussing viral videos nowadays, I came across Beverly Chung’s blog post – “Bad Publicity – Is it really all that bad?” and I immediately thought of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Uploaded on February 10, Rebecca Black’s Friday music video attracted over 87 million on YouTube as of now. What makes “Friday” so special is because it’s possibly the most disliked video, with over 1.7 million dislikes out of 2 million votes. While everyone’s criticizing on Rebecca Black’s vocal talent as well as the lyrics of the song, “Friday” undoubtedly became viral and started spreading on the Internet through social media, including Facebook and Twitter.

I believe (and hope) that the producers didn’t expect that much negative criticism on the song when they we’re producing it because if they planned to sabotage the whole thing, then it would be quite mean to Rebecca herself (a 13-year old girl who’s pursuing her dream in the music industry). Therefore, I can’t really judge if it’s ethical to “sabotage” a product itself just to make it viral or not.

While I was reading one my marketing classmate’s blog, one of her marketing blog posts immediately grabbed my attention. Titled “Apple’s ‘Us Vs. Them’ Approach“, Beverly clearly indicates Apple’s promotional strategy on their TV advertisements. Not only in the current decade, Apple has already engraved the idea of being “fun, new, and extraordinary” in their ad in 1984.What does 1984 remind you of? Other than the well-known novel about dictatorship and brain-washing, it’s also the launch date of the first Macintosh. Apple combined these 2 elements together and launched a TV ad that depicts a woman being in a crowd of brain-washed humans. This was to attempt to separate themselves from the bunch of competitors.

Another video ad that Apple created a few years ago (and you might still see it on TVs) is the one that it shows two men, one that looks more geeky, where the other one looks cooler. The geeky guy calls himself “PC”, and the cool dude calls himself “Mac”. As the ad progresses, the cool guy attracts a pretty young lady to his side whereas a not-so-attractive woman (man-in-disguise) sides with the geeky guy. This makes a clear distinction between the two.

What makes me find this ad not ethical is how Apple portraits PC as being the “geek”. Being one of the most (or not, the most) used technology on the planet, PCs are technically ahead of the game in terms of sales. Apple’s strategy in these TV ads is simply just trying to taint PCs image, and thus as a result showing how much better Apple machines are. This strategy, however, would not really work on individuals who are loyal to PCs. To me it just looks unethical and makes me dislike Apple even more. Apple should probably try another tactic instead of crippling its main competitor’s public image since it’d garner more hate from the public.

As you can tell, most students are either pretty lazy (maybe just me) or really keen and involved in school. I once was pretty skeptical about finding part-time jobs and even volunteer work because I thought it wouldn’t really “build” my career path (like I mean, volunteering wouldn’t really have anything to do in my future), but apparently I proved myself wrong after spending so much time on extracurricular activities in high school.

I laid my hands down on my first part-time job during grade 12 two years ago. Initially my reason for working somewhere was just to earn money with my spare time and also to have something to fill up the gaps on the Sauder application form. It was pretty scary at first, I mean working with people that I didn’t know and I didn’t have any experience at all. But after a while I started liking working as a team and attempted to satisfy each customer that we had. We had good times, when customers phoned back and giving us constructive feedback, and bad times when customers called back and ranted on us for mistakenly taken their orders.

While having fun and enjoying my first part-time job, I learned so much about working as a team and how to manage relationships with other employees. My manager is who I believe made the job fun and not-that-intimidating anymore because she cared about teaching us these things. Personally speaking, even though I wouldn’t really recommend working in a fast food chain, the experience that I had there was totally different from working with a student team in school. I didn’t even notice that these are certain aspects of OBHR until I took the course last term. Other than the OBHR stuff that she taught me, I also learned from her about managing the logistics of the items that we had in our store (which was also another great experience that I didn’t expect to learn at a fastfood chain).

If you have to ask who I learned the greatest lesson in my whole life from, my parents would totally qualify for it since they’ve taught me a lot since I was born. But in terms of working in a real job environment, I would have to say it’d be the manager of my first job.

Have you ever played video games? Other than the gaming content, have you noticed that you’ve also been exposed to the effects that video game music causes?

Parker Mason from blogcampaigning wrote a blog entry (Games and Music: The Soundtrack of the Game) about video game music. Based on my understanding after reading his blog post, video game music is defined as pieces that loop endlessly without lyrics. If you’re no ordinary gamer, you wouldn’t really pay attention to the music played while you smash on the buttons on your controller.

Mason suggests that video game music from 20-30 years ago were actually purposefully simply written just to ensure that it stuck to people’s brains easily. The first extraordinary example was the music in Space Invaders, where the background music changes accordingly to the level and the status of your spaceship. However, video game music probably didn’t attract gamers due to technological difficulties in creating pleasant tunes.

Have you ever noticed the change in the background music of your favourite Pokemon games?

Nowadays, video game music has evolved from simple MIDI files into better quality documents that support the use of different musical layers and several musical instruments. Video game music has been considered as the “soul” of the game itself. Knowing that that gamers actually notice the background music in games, gaming companies took a huge risk and began selling OSTs (original soundtracks) of their games. This became pretty successful, thus popular games right now oftern launch their own OSTs. Some gaming companies, for instance Square Enix, periodically organizes concerts to showcase their famous pieces. Even though the sales of game music dropped significantly, it has still remained the third bestselling genre.

From Rihanna’s newest single to Starbuck’s new logo, Microsoft Windows to Zara, Facebook has been used by every type of business to advertise their newest products. Facebook users are constantly bombarded with product information with the use of Facebook Pages, Groups, and Likes. One may question, is this marketing method effective?

With almost a 4 million growth in the number of Facebook users last month in the United States, Facebook secures the spot of “King of All Social Media”. A study conducted by MerchantCircle has suggested that, many of the small businesses are also in favor of using Facebook, the ultimate social media, to market their products. After beating Twitter and MySpace in terms of the number of users, Facebook this time kicks Google out of its throne and becomes the dominant social media that small businesses use to advertise their products; more than 70% of the survey participants responded that they are currently (or in the past) using Facebook to promote their products. The study also discovers that, most small business owners are optimistic about the future.

Most of these businesses, however, rely on the use of “side advertisements” (the ones that are known to choose advertisements that are specifically based on what each user is interested in). While this marketing strategy may be effective, it may turn down a number of potential customers as well as causing harm to the reputation of the business due to ethical issues (data gathering without permission). Most businesses are fragile to damages to their reputation; in the case of small businesses, the effect would be more devastating since most small business rely on frequent customers and word of mouth marketing.

Effectiveness or reputation damages, which one would small businesses side with?

If you haven’t noticed, McDonald’s is giving out free coffee AGAIN (last time was last November). What intrigues me about this matter is that, how and why is McDonald’s trying to put itself into the furious battle between coffee shops.

Free McDonald's coffee this week! Would you want one?

Coffee consumption has been rising for every country in the world. In Canada, the coffee consumption per capita has risen from 4.5 kg per person in 1997 to 6.5 kg per person in 2007 (Source: World Resource Institute). One reason for this may possibly trace back to the “boom” of coffee shops in Canada a decade ago.

While the major coffee competition in Canada is between Starbucks and Tim Hortons, McDonald’s on the other hand, tries to enter the battlefield. Famous for its French fries and burgers, McDonald’s squeezes itself into the market by introducing the first McCafe to Canadians in 2001 (Source: Espressotec). While the majority of the income comes from fastfood, McDonald’s tries hard to snatch customers from other coffee chains by offering specialty coffee drinks.

Now McDonald’s, as one of the newcomers in the coffee industry, attempts to promote its coffee by handing out free coffee. Does this really attract people though? According to Coffee Review, the quality of McDonald’s coffee is still not comparable to major coffee chains such as Starbucks.

In my opinion, McDonald’s is lacking the enthusiasm in creating new, special coffee products to attract potential new customers. For instance, it does not offer special recipes to customers. While McDonald’s is one (or maybe the most) successful fastfood chain, it does not have the knowledge, nor enough creativity to compete with coffee chains that specializes only in coffee. Maybe McDonald’s would be better off focusing on their fastfood products.

I was flipping my marketing book earlier and discovered there’s a section related to copycat products. One may ask, what are copycat products? In my opinion, they are essentially company brand products that have similar (or even exact) physical appearance, and the names of these products are often similar to the real ones. These copycat products are usually found right next to the “real” products in order to confuse customers to purchase the fake one.

During a grocery shopping trip to a supermarket, I was shocked when I found a product called “Mum’s Cookies” sitting beside Kraft/Christie’s “Dad’s Cookies”. They had similar packaging, and the names of the products made me laugh for the whole day. “Mum’s Cookies”, the copycat product, was selling at a lower price than “Dad’s Cookies”. Not only cookies, popular necessities such as juice, shower gel, and even medicine pills are often “copied”. What bothers me the most is that, how come it’s legal to produce copycat products? The copyright law protects products such as books, music, movies from being copied directly. But why are companies not penalized for producing copycat products?

Taken from preseidentschoice.ca

Top: Copycat product; Bottom: Real product

Notice how similar their bottles look alike.

Taken from dealseekingmom.com

Looking from another point of view, is it ethical to manufacture copycat products? It seems like the producers of copycat products steal the appearance of the original product, but often with inferior content inside the packaging. My opinion is that, the government should interfere by enforcing laws to penalize companies that produce copycat products since it’s not ethical and clashes with the idea of the copyright law.

Just by reading the title of this marketing blog post I bet you can already guess that I’m going to talk about Subway’s latest promotion – the “Five Dollar Footlong” promotion.

mysubwayoc.com

Normally, the footlong subs cost more than 6 dollars, but with this promotion, consumers can purchase the “classic subs” for $5 (including tax of course).

What really intrigues me about this marketing campaign is the annoyance  of  the slogan. In their ad, they just keep on repeating the slogan “$5, $5, $5 footlong” for at least three times before the commercial ends. Not just on the TV, Subway also promotes this campaign on radio stations; so don’t be shocked when you hear something about the $5 footlongs while listening to your favourite music. In addition, this marketing campaign also reaches the Youtube audience by force playing the ad whenever the play button is pressed.

Overall I believe that this is a pretty interesting and actually an appealing  and effective marketing campaign since it technically grabs one’s attention and “brainwash” them with the $5 footlong song. According to MSN Money, Subway actually promoted this marketing campaign before in the past and generated a whopping $3.8 billion in the US and was one of the top 10 fast food brands in the US. Now that they’re doing it in Canada, a country with a lower population, I wonder if they can pull it off again.

A few hours earlier my friend and I went grocery shopping at a supermarket near campus. As we were walking through the aisle that contained baking goods, something grabbed our attention. There was this small box that had the iconic rooster logo for Kellogg’s corn flakes sitting near the spices, and that immediately caught my attention. “Why is there a box of cereal over there? Ah, someone must have just ditched it here since they’re too lazy to walk and put it back into the right place.” As I walked closer to the box of corn flakes, I noticed there was an additional word right below the word “corn flake”. That was actually a box of corn flake crumbs.

(Image from grocerycheckout.com)

You can probably tell by now that I don’t really cook, nor do I bake. I’ve seen boxes of bread crumbs at supermarkets before, but corn flake crumbs? Really? What makes it more interesting is that it’s under the product line of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I remember today in our marketing class we learned about segmentation, and under that broad category there’s this “product-related” subcategory with “benefit sought” as one of the variables.

Ideally, corn flakes are consumed as cereal. However, being flavorless technically forced me to purchase other types of corn flakes such as Kellogg’s frosted flakes. It’s technically the same recipe but just with sugar coating on the surface. I thought those two were the only variations that corn flakes can diversify into, I didn’t expect them to crumble corn flakes up and sell them as a separate item. I guess Kellogg’s is just trying to expand their corn flake empire and satisfy everyone’s needs.

I was just browsing the internet for materials for week 2’s marketing blog assignment until I saw this piece of news.

DiGiorno’s Pizza And Cookies Combo Is Watershed Moment In American Obesity

DiGiorno, one of the largest frozen pizza brands in the United States, is launching a new product that boxes two of American’s most favorite foods, pizza and cookies, together. DiGiorno is a product under the well-known brand Nestlé. DiGiorno is marketed under the name of “Delissio” in Canada.

Normally pizzas go with appetizers such as chicken wings or cheese-y bread sticks (and DiGiorno has already packaged pizza and wings before in the past, according to the left picture below).

Source: www.delish.com

But this time, DiGiorno chose to pair up pizza with chocolate chip cookies (to be exact, cookie dough that bakes 12 cookies), which none of the frozen pizza companies had done before. This undoubtedly broadens the target market to parents, since chocolate chip cookies is one of children’s favourite snack. Nestlé at the same time, can advertise their chocolate chip cookie dough and let consumers have a sample of what they taste like, thus increasing the chance of people actually purchasing them in the future.

Pairing up these two items seem like it’ll create a perfect meal for families. However, according to Nestlé’s webpage on their chocolate chip cookie dough,  1 serving of it already contains 130 calories and 12% of fat; also according to fatsecret.com, DiGiorno pizzas have an average of 350 calories per 1/5 pizza. Imagine if someone purchases the pizza/cookie combo and consumes the whole thing him/herself, that would automatically be 3310 calories!

This pizza/cookie combo does look mouth-watering to people. However, Nestlé isn’t doing a very great job on lowering the obesity rate in the United States.