Team Amazon

Assignment 1 and 2:

These two assignments are largely rather straightforward, we agreed to a certain direction that we want to aim towards and we all worked together to work towards the goal. It was largely successful as evidenced by the marks.

However, the comment gotten from Assignment 2 threw us off a little bit because it seems that we needed to find or justify a better market segment.

Assignment 3:

Our discussions about assignment 3 started over-ambitious, with too many substance thrown into it. This is especially bad considering we only have 5 minutes to fit everything in. As we progress forward, certain objectives became unclear and some a left confused on how to execute the objective.

Equally importantly, the amount of time spent into storyboarding, really solidifying what we actually want to shoot is not enough, coupled with very little time available for us to meet together to shoot the video, more confusion arose after the video is shot.

More discussions were held, and a partial rethinking of the video went forward. We decided to scale down our ambitions, and proceeded to include more texts to better explain our strategy rather than relying on the storyline in the video to do the job.

Overall, in hindsight, better planning, more solidifying of the ideas and more time allotted to filming should help the project a lot. That said, I am proud of my team and very happy with the results that we have achieved. Rock on!

This post will be in response to Rabiaal’s post regarding marketing in religion:https://blogs.ubc.ca/rabiaalaqillahshazali/2013/11/03/unseen-application-marketing-in-religion/

Rabiaal interestingly brought up the possible 4P’s of marketing with regards to the religion, and gave examples of how it may or may not be effective. I’d like to dive a little bit deeper into the question about marketing and see how everything fits together in a more business context.

How does a religious organization survive?

This is probably the biggest question when it comes to cash flow of an organization that should, on the outset, promote charity, poverty and community. The largest sum of money from religious organizations come from donations, if not all of them.

While donations are not exactly purely transactionary in nature, there is a general consensus that with donations, people do expect certain things out of a religious institutions.

This begs the question of: What do the consumers (devotees) expect from their money and how do these institutions fulfill it?

Place

In order to attract and retain devotees, usually places of worship are renovated and extended to increase attendance, improve loyalty as well as ensuring that devotees feel as comfortable as possible during their time there.

Price

In order to keep a steady flow of revenue, many places of worship utilizes a system where a small portion of the devotees’ income is donated to the organization. However, many places also have an entirely voluntary system, which focuses on its core offerings to encourage devotees’ to donate regularly.

Product

Often, in order to fulfill the growing needs of devotees, money is invested in the religious teacher to further their studies. This is a form of investment to better serve the ‘product’ of better and more thoughtful teachings in the future.

Promotion

Major religions such as Christianity and Islam actively encourage different forms of spreading the religion through peaceful and friendly means. Essentially, religious institutions rely heavily on the word-of-mouth for their promotion.

As seen above, religious institutions also highly depend on business skills in order to thrive and strengthen in today’s world.

Brand Ambassadors is not a new concept of marketing, it is perhaps as early, if not earlier than the concept of marketing itself.

The idea of brand ambassadors is relatively simple compared to other, more sophisticated marketing techniques: Take an already famous person with many admirers, pay the person to endorse your products and then hope that they can influence their admirers to purchase your products.

With big name companies using brand ambassadors at an aggressive scale, surely it must be working, right?

Let’s analyze a few cases to have a clearer picture.

Out of all companies, perhaps Nike is the most aggressive in terms of courting its brand ambassadors. LeBron James, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are just a few examples of strong brand ambassadors for Nike. And looking at how Nike is doing currently, and how consumers are relating to the Nike brand, it is hard to argue against the effectiveness of brand ambassadors.

However, if we shift to another industry, things look a little bit different.

In the tech industry, examples of up-and-center brand ambassadors are Alicia Keys for BlackBerry and Jessica Alba for Windows Phone. Both are weak and flailing brands in the mobile operating system market.

Meanwhile, Apple uses famous actors in their commercial, not binding them as brand ambassadors, as seen in these Siri – advertisements. And needless to say, their marketing campaign trounces the competition.

So what do we actually make of brand ambassadors?

Firstly, it highly depends on whether a market leader with strong exposure is using it or a weaker competitor is trying to use it to catch up. It seems that brand ambassadors work best for strong market leaders to further cement their position.

Secondly, it also highly depends on the industry of the business. As the sporting industry has more people trying to become athletes, they are more inclined to buy what the athletes recommend them. The same link cannot be established between an actress and a technology product.