Market This!

It is said in The Marketing Blog (external) that google has recently come out with a service expansion in their google places service. How it works is that business are able to add Google Tags to certain places so that it is easier for customers to find the place, and on top of that, it allows business to place special coupons and promotions of the like in said prized google spot.
So what this marketing news means in the greater marketing scheme? It means that marketers have to be always aware of what’s going recently, because if they don’t they miss out on great opportunities like this one. Business that adapt quickly to this new google service will have an advantage over all others because they have an advertisement advantage. Meaning that companies who keep on the loop will receive greater benefits than the ones who don’t.

Alexander Mak in his blog wrote about the convergence between reality and gaming, giving specific reference to the Call of Duty franchise that now has products that are Call of Duty branded that are not video games.
Indeed, this trend is getting quite common! If one checks electronics stores, it is quite easy to find “gamer” branded materials. There are gamer mice, keyboard, towers, processors, graphics cards, monitors, fans, Drinks, and I kid you not, Glasses.
The intent for these products is clear: to tap into the gamer market, a market that traditionally has not been reached to, due to the draconian societal stigma against “gamers”. Nowadays things are changing though, and gamers are now being treated just like any other social group that is vulnerable to powerful consumerist promotion. Hooray! Equality for all.
In all seriousness though, the gamer market is one with potential, that could potentially be taped by companies who know what theyre doing. They are a difficult market however, as they have needs and wants that are different from the traditional markets.
Now excuse me, gotta finish Black Ops’ campaign.

For a company that works on a value-driven approach, there is no customer type better than the advocate. The advocate is the customer that not only buys the product and stays loyal to but, but they also go out of their way to promote the product to their friends, or even to strangers. We’ve all dealt with advocates, perhaps you are an advocate yourself. There are the “apple fanboys/girls” who go around telling everyone to get macs and ipods and iphones. There are the “Xbox fanboy/girls” who can’t wait to repeat for the thousandth time that the Playstation and the Wii are inferior choices. There are the Honda enthusiasts who just won’t ever suggest a car that isn’t Honda. The bottom line is, it’s simply impossible to not deal with advocates in at least a weekly basis.
Therefore, it is easily observable that advocates are everywhere. But it is important for marketers to notice that it is much easier for certain products to generate advocates than others. Usually, advocates appear to defend products that are inherently more expensive and that involve larger opportunity costs. An example would be a car, or a computer, since both of them require a relatively large financial investment, when compared to more mundane things, like cereal. It is very hard to see someone arguing over cereal. Another thing that tends to incentivize (i love this word) advocacy is when there is little utility gained from having a second item of that same type. Again, let’s talk about laptops. There is very little to gain from having 2 laptops. Therefore, it is irrational for someone deciding between an HP and an Acer laptop to choose both, because they would gain very little extra utility. Therefore, the choice is more important. Contrast that with shirts, where you can easily buy both shirts you like, since apparently wearing the same shirt everyday is frowned upon.

Nonetheless, it is possible to create reasons for customers to become advocates. If you add a social value to your product, it drives customers to advocacy. For example, if you promote your product as environmentally friendly, and your customers are environment enthusiasts, chances are that there will be some extra advocates popping up, telling their friends to get this new fancy green product.

Go forth and reproduce, advocates!

Advertisement placement is an art in the sense that they have to reach the largest number of members of the target audience as possible for the least amount of money spent possible. A traditional example is, if one wishes to advertise their new male cologne, advertisers probably would not line up to publish their ads on Cosmo, but probably would be eager to place their ads in car magazines. It is always important for marketers to take into consideration the demographic component of the places they advertise at. If there is a billboard that for some reason is seen mostly by female youth, that billboard should only be used for products that targets this target market, right?
The next logical step to this targeted advertisement strategy is web pages, including social networks like Facebook. It is already a quite big success, as the deep pockets of Google (through AdSense) and Facebook (through targeted advertisements), and yet it is still a growing industry. How they work is quite simple. Google’s ad network detects your browsing history through your use of google products, and through your stored cookies. Then it compares your usage habits with the adverts that companies pay to be in their database. Then, it displays the ad that is most similar to your web usage habits. That way, if you are a user that uses google to search for new laptops, Google knows that it should show you ads for HP, Apple and Lenovo. There wouldn’t be much chance of it showing you completely irrelevant ads, like ads for refrigerators. Facebook’s work in a similar fashion, except that Facebook knows your intimate details even more, since you decided to share them with Facebook.
The upside of such targeted advertisement is that you receive focused advertisement that has greater chance to interest you. The downside is that your demographic information is (possibly) stored in a database somewhere.
Ethics aside, it is unquestionable that this field of targeted advertisement will become the main form of advertisement in the next coming year. It will be gone those days where perfectly healthy people are bombarded by prescription drug ads. Welcome the new internet overlords.

Chris Neels has posted an interested blog article about Corporate Social Responsibility . He argues that companies shouldn’t be doing things that are good for the community, because that hurts profit maximizing behaviour, and because of that, people are worse off. Additionally, he says that the BoD of a company shouldn’t be using shareholder’s money for Charity because that’s immoral and inefficient.

This will address his conclusions, which I find potentially faulty:
* Firstly, companies don’t do these projects because they are nice. They do that because they have never deviated from their profit-maximizing objective. CSR deviates from profit and efficiency maximization as much as marketing, which is to say, it doesn’t. CSR makes the company look better and more socially responsible when compared to other companies. When you live in an age where people, yes, are expecting companies to be more responsible, engaging in this social responsibility acts as a complement to the companies’ marketing scheme, since it increases awareness about the company and positions the company as one that is so close to their customers, that they directly help them

* The second claim is that because companies are not as focused in maximizing profits, people are worse off. This is fallacious in many levels. Firstly, profit maximization does not necessarily lead to the well-being of the population. Just take a look at monopolies. Competition makes people better off, not the bottom line for shareholders. Secondly, profit disregards externalities and non-monetary effects. Most companies do produce negative externalities, which means that the company is making everyone else worse off just so they can become better off themselves. There is nothing bad to the community if companies are ‘trying’ to offset such externalities. Is money being diverted from product research? Maybe. But money is also saved, because CSR works as marketing.

Are companies less efficient than charities at doing public good? Yes. Which is why most of the time companies prefer to donate to those charities. Sometimes though, they wish to grab some marketing attention out of CSR, and there is nothing immoral or inefficient about it. It’s simply uniting the useful with the nice. Companies look nice, people feel better, everyone wins!

Today I’ll be talking about the interesting brand positioning that the “Halls” product has. As someone born and raised in the South American country of Brazil, I was always used to see Halls as candy. Over there, it is marketed, packaged, and sold as candy, seen in newspaper stands, corner stores, pretty much anywhere that sold a variety of candies.
One of the surprises that I had when I arrived here in Canada was that over here Halls is sold and marketed as medicine, as a cough drop or something like that. Of course, as someone who always saw it as candy I scoffed at that and couldn’t possibly imagine how someone could possibly convince people that candy was medicine. But apparently the brand positioning of Halls does just that in North America. When I decide to randomly chew some Halls for the pleasure of it, I sometimes get asked if I have a cold or something, and then I get a confused face when I tell them that no, I was perfectly fine.

I am still not really sure if there is a difference in the composition for Brazilian and Canadian halls, but from the limited results I got from Google, there isn’t any difference unless you consider the special Vitamin-C Halls.

If anything, this is pretty strong evidence that Marketing branding is of great importance for a product. If you can convince countries that candies are cough drops, or vice-versa, that is one fascinating feat.

(I apologize for the tardiness. I was in Toronto for a tournament these past few days, which severely limited my internet connectivity.)

One very entertaining advertisement strategy is when you respond directly to your competitor’s marketing campaign. Responses are usually funny, thoughtful, and are actually quite effective in persuading consumers that maybe the competitor isn’t all that much better.

A very recent example would be Axe’s response to the massively successful Old Spice marketing campaign. For those who live under a rock, Old Spice has been advertising their products using an apparently very classy, strong, and benevolent man who builds orphanages with his bare hands, rides horses, and responds to youtube videos while wearing nothing but a towel. A sensation among youth, the marketing campaign is widely seen as sucessful. Axe responds to this campaign with a simple ad, that reminds everyone of Axe’s single-minded objective: help men get the attention of women. The effectiveness of this particular response ad can be debated, of course. On one hand, it does seem effective in the sense that axe’s target market (young men seeking women) would be reminded that their brand is the most effective when it comes to “what matters” (to them). On the other hand, this reponse ad, just like any other, requires the consumer to be aware of the other marketing campaign. Basing your own advertisement on the assumption that your target consumer has already been targeted by your competitor is risky.
Here are some other example response ads:

Straightforward: Competitor says that they’re better now, company sneaks attacks them and says that they were responsible for that.

Also self-explanatory.
For those interested, the aftermatch was as follows: Audi puts up a billboard that says “Better check your luxury badge, it may have expired”. BMW responds by pulling their ad, and making it look like Audi is schizophrenic and talking to themselves.

One common and powerful useful marketing strategy used by most retailers, is the “SALE” word. When normal customers are walking around at a mall, they tend to go to places where there are having sales, because there they assume they are going to acquire the best value for their dollar. Of course, retailers know this, and they use that for their advantage. A few retailers blatantly abuse the SALE signs, by having literally year-long sales. An example of this would be  men’s clothing stores like International and Stockhomme, who are always having some kind of sale. The issue with abusing the SALE sign is that while it might attract unaware customers, soon enough people will catch on that the sale signs are meaningless.

Starter retailers use the SALE sign more sparingly, using them as a weapon of price discrimination and impulse shopping. You are a customer. There is a 24 hour sale on a sweet shirt. You are not totally sure if you really like the shirt, but it is 50% off and you know for sure that the store doesn’t have sales very often. Chances are, you are going to buy the shirt. Or so the stores hope. The idea is of “limited time offers” is that there is only one time that you should buy the product from the store – now. This tends to increase sales due to customers buying things they don’t really need at the moment, but hey, it was on sale!

The other extreme when compared to the first one is to simply never do sales and put up posters saying that your retails has “everyday low value” items, which is why you do not do sales. This is of course, not very effective, because it removes the whole price discrimination aspect that comes with sales. For example, a rich person might be willing to spend $100 on a shirt, but a middle-class person wouldn’t part with more than $40 for it. The smart move for a retailer is to sell that shirt firstly for $100, and if the item hasn’t been sold after a while, set up a sale for those expensive items at more friendly prices. “Everyday low value” strategies often aren’t very powerful exactly because the retailers lose out on that surplus from people who have more funds.

The bottom line is, therefore, that while the sale appeal is very powerful, it is very important to not overuse it. Just like anything else, too much of something turns nauseating and sickening. It should be used with care.

Nowadays it seems like marketing companies are incredibly interested in advertisements through social media.

The allure is understandable: it is very cheap, it has the potential to reach the youth market in a very effective manner, and it allows for greater marketing freedoms (since advertisements aren’t confined to 30 or 60 second TV ads)

Companies can be extremely succesful through social media advertisement. For example, Dove uploaded a YouTube video that was incredibly popular.

They had no publishing costs for that video, but they still reached millions of viewers, and were able to display a long video that they couldn’t show otherwise. A success story.

Not everyone seems to understand how to be successful via Social Media, however. A lot of marketing companies seem to think that simply posted links on Facebook and spamming Fan pages is good enough to attract attention to their company. Or simply adding a Twitter page. That, sadly, is not enough. Internet users are very used to ignoring web ads, and anything that even resembles an ad will be promptly ignored.

So how to succeed in the social media environment? Well, simple, do not make your ad look like an ad. Attempt to engage with individuals. Create a video, or blog post, or picture, that teaches a lesson instead of being blatant product promotion. Something that catches people’s attention.

Because truthfully, everyone avoids ads.

For my first Marketing Blog post, I will take a look at WestJet’s marketing strategy. As a frequent flier, I deal with air companies quite often, so analysing an air company is quite natural.

The average consumer can immediately notice that WestJet spends a considerably larger amount of money in advertisement when compared to their major competitor, Air Canada, at least in the Vancouver region. For example, West Jet ads can be seen quite often around skytrain stations and the trains themselves. This already gives them an edge over Air Canada, since West Jet would be the first aviation company that consumers that see their ads everyday would remember, when booking their flights. This is very beneficial to them, naturally.

The ads themselves are of unusual nature, when it comes to air travel companies. They feature a multitude of plane crew members holding up signs. This gives the company a nice, friendly, front, since customers can more easily feel empathy towards crew members than planes. This adds a competitive advantage towards the company, because customers will think of West Jet as nice and friendly, while they would think of Air Canada as a cold, disconnected company. Considering that the air fare price is very similar among those two companies, West Jet would naturally gain the edge when a customer is booking their flights.

It is important to notice however, that West Jet’s marketing campaign is targeted towards “regular” customers, not businessmen. West Jet is currently lagging behind Air Canada when it comes to business travel, and that is because Air Canada has a reputation among businessmen. But WJ decided to not compensate for their weakness, but to focus on their strength – budget traveling.  This is sound decision making, that has the company’s SWOT in mind. West Jet would have to spend a lot more money to be able to tackle AC in their own niche.

Therefore, I can conclude that West Jet’s advertisement scheme is very well founded, and one that should be followed as an example, since it is simple, clean, effective, and plays on the company’s strengths, rather than weaknesses.

Disclaimer: I have no brand loyalty towards them, I fly either via WJ or AC, I don’t really care as long as the price is cheaper. =)