Tim Tse's Blog

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.