Marketing - Consumers are always right...

How many of you get persuaded to purchase something just because another brand that appeals to you is also part of producing the product? This is an example of CO-BRANDING, and it is basically when two company/brands come together and produce a product together. This definitely increases my incentives to buy a certain product because it appeals to me more now that I know another brand I like is also part of the product. It also increases my trust towards the product. Here are some examples of CO-BRANDING:

APPLE and NIKE have created an iPod gizmo to put more rhythm in your run: the Nike and iPod Sports Kit. The wireless kit lets Nike’s new Air Zoom Moire shoes send fitness data to your iPod Nano — via a sensor you tuck inside the running shoe and a small receiver that attaches to the Nano!

KELLOGG’S fruit flavoured snacks in the shape of Tinkerbell characters and features:

Kellogg’s fruit flavoured snacks in the shape of Toy Story characters!

H&M and LANVIN came together and produced a line of clothing together. (IT WAS ALL SOLD OUT IN AN AFTERNOON!)

HUNTER shoes and JIMMYCHOO came together and created a special edition pair of rain boots!

Christmas is just around the corner! Most businesses are now starting to decorate their in-store environment, offer Christmas decorated goods, include Christmas designs on store items and provide sales promotion due to the holiday season. This is a good way in attracting customers into their stores just because everyone’s looking forward to their winter holiday.

Starbucks is a good example that is currently doing this. As soon as you walk into any Starbucks retail store, their store atmosphere make you feel like its Christmas already. When you purchase a Starbucks drink, you automatically get a cup that is decorated with Christmas decorations. This is a good form of promotion for Starbucks because it creates brand awareness since the cup being held is so different from all other cups of coffee you can purchase elsewhere. They also offer many Christmas related gifts such as Christmas decorated mugs and tumblers, special packaged ornaments, soft toys and even packaged coffee samplers.

Building onto Joey’s blog on “What’s on Sale at Starbucks This Christmas?” which she only included in-store tangible products I listed above, Starbucks actually created a sales promotion just to promote their special holiday drinks. Starbucks offered a buy one get the second one free sale especially for their holiday drinks. This encouraged a lot of people to go with their friends or lover to enjoy one of Starbucks holiday drinks.

On top of that, Starbucks also created a website especially for their special Christmas offers. As well as showing details of what they offer, the website also allows customers to share their wishes to others via Facebook and Twitter. Therefore this includes co-branding and social media in increasing awareness of their brand. Talking about the social media, Starbucks also created a video that temporarily promotes the offer of holiday drinks.

WATCH THE VIDEO! (Link below)
It’s really creative 🙂

Holiday Drinks on Starbucks.com

American Apparel’s growth is explosive. It has more than 300 stores around the world and their retail sales are enormous. American Apparel has expanded product range, improved systems and supply chain management. Their retail stores are also designed to improve productivity of the store to help increase sales and employees to work faster.

American Apparel is a store ran in a Boutique style model with only one size available for each style of clothing. Therefore the speed of replenishment is critical. They also offer more items per square meter store space. However, employees find it very difficult to manage the store on busy days since only one size is available per item.

Due to this problem in many retail stores, the RFID system is introduced. It finds lost sales items that are not on the sales floor and recognize what needs to be replenished. The RFID system is a reader of tags, and also allows in store inventory tracking system.

This RFID system speeds up point of sales, increases the efficiency of replenishing correct items onto the sales floor because right after the point of sale, the RFDI systems informs the back stock what size and product is need to be replenished and then it will quickly update the sales floor. This allows the employees to interact with customers more, improving the brand image.

The American Apparel stores that have the RFID system implemented experiences a 14% increase in sales than a normal AA store without the RFID sales.

More details as to how the RFID system works:

Bored of your browser for Mac? Bored of Firefox and Safari? Tired of typing facebook.com into your browser every time you go online? Well the newly creative RockMelt browser for Mac is released, and it simply implements your Facebook account onto your browser. Onto somewhere convenient so whenever your friends are online you will be able to see, and also whenever there are newly updates. It also allows you to send inbox messages and write on your friends’ walls. Mostly everything you want to do on Facebook you can do on the RockMelt browser. My friend just invited me to use it and I absolutely love it. It saves me the trouble in browsing through Facebook trying to find what my friends have been up to. It certainly helps me keep track on their life in university.

Here are the things you can do on your browser through RockMelt.

Before accepting my friend’s invitation, I searched up RockMelt on youtube and this is the tour guide I got. It amazed me as to how he used a very applicable real life example to go through almost everything that can be done on RockMelt.

Advertisements don’t always have to promote certain products to increase their brand awareness. There are also other ways in which a company can increase their brand awareness. For example Nike produced an advert simply by creating an inspirational speech targeted to especially athletes, sportsman and the general public.

This inspirational speech can motivate anyone in doing well in whatever they want to achieve in life. After watching this advert, I thought it was very creative and definitely differentiated Nike from other sports brand just because I have never seen anything like this from other brands.

And for all of the football players/fans out there, here’s one for you guys:

So we all know that October was the month of Breast Cancer Awareness. Did you all see booths and events around you asking you to donate money or ask you about whether or not you know about breast cancer? Well for people who didn’t know about it, hospitals like the one in Portland, Oregon marketed breast cancer with just a simple dance they made in their spare time. I thought it was a really meaningful marketing strategy because it shows how much it means to them for people to know more about breast cancer. The fact that the dance is performed by all medical staffs made it seem even more important as to why we should know more about it.

Whenever someone mentions McDonalds to me, I immediately crave for the some quarter pounder and McNuggets. Although its unhealthy, their taste, convenience and low priced meals always attracts my grumbling stomach. Building onto Brian Chan’s blog on “Great Reasons to Eat Unhealthy”, I feel like McDonalds’ advertisements are amazingly smart. It’s different to many other advertisements I’ve seen. They are not just some billboards with words or posters with colours and captions. They actually give a lot of thought into it.

Lamppost in downtown Vancouver

Large tissue dispenser to promote the new extra sized meal

Their “healthy approach” in offering salads and vegetables

“The Real Milkshake” – as the cow jump on the trampolines, they “shake” and make real milksakes…

Using fries to incorporate their Wifi availability in McDonald shops

I strongly agree with TzeTzi Pang’s opinion on her most recent blog “Blackberry Playbook? Really?” on the new Blackberry Playbook. She said that she would have never thought of buying a product like iPad, but after seeing Blackberry Playbook she would consider a product like that. I feel like the iPad that many people are dying to have right now is indifferent to any other products Apple sell such as the iPhone or iTouch or even the new released touch screen Nano. They are just made in different sizes with some minor changes! All of these interfaces look the same! If you don’t think so, see for yourself…

The iTouch…

and then the iPhone…

and then the iPad…

Don’t they just look excactly the same?

Now the new Blackberry Playbook is very different. It even offers more than what the iPad offers. The Blackberry Playbook offers the following:

• High-resolution 1024 x 600 pixels widescreen display
• Lightweight at just 0.9 lbs, compared to the iPad’s 1.5 lbs
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 1 GB RAM
• Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing)
• Supports HD video recording
• Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
• Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
• HDMI video output

After looking at the Blackberry Playbook, I think I would rather purchase the Blackberry Playbook than the iPad because of its differentiated functions compared to other blackberry products.

THE BLACKBERRY PLAYBOOK!!! 😀

So I was doing some online shopping on TOMS Shoes the other day, and found out one very interesting marketing strategy that I thought was very meaningful and different. This video below shows what they do every year.

Every year, workers and volunteers from TOMS will have a “Shoe Drop” in one selected country to deliver free shoes. Ever pair purchases, TOMS gives one pair of shoes to a child in need. I think this ethical and charitable marketing strategy helped TOMS Shoes build a very strong brand image and customer’s loyalty. After I watched it I was really impressed with what they do and it automatically increased my trust with this brand.

There are many banned commercials out there that are not released. But the question is, why do companies still release their commercials that are obviously unethical, non-educational or inappropriate? Why waste the time and money on something that is going to be banned from the market from seeing? Is this part of their marketing strategy? To produce something that is going to be banned to increase people’s awareness because it is outrageous or inappropriately funny so people will talk about it on channels like YouTube, blogs or forums? Or do they think that the commercials like that are not going to be banned and actually ATTRACT consumers?

Commercials like this: Do YOU think they are acceptable to be released?!