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.

Coca Cola is perhaps one of the most famous companies that utilizes guerrilla marketing, with a long history and tradition of promoting the brand through unconventional means.

http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/cocacola-returns-outdoor-theatre-marketing-effort/

This website documents some of Coca Cola’s efforts in guerrilla marketing.

At the same time however, one of the most influential figures in guerrilla marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson, the author of The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook believed that this form of marketing is best served for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Why then, would Coca Cola fiercely market its products through this form of marketing?

I think many of the main points and advantage of guerrilla marketing highlighted by Levinson actually fits very well with what Coca Cola wants to achieve. Due to Coca Cola’s unique market position as the brand that everyone knows, constantly being in the top 10 in terms of worldwide brand recognition, Coca Cola perhaps doesn’t need more customers. What Coca Cola needs however, are more returning customers, customers who would buy more of their drinks, at a more frequent rate.

Guerrilla marketing fits this perfectly because the aim of guerrilla marketing, if done right, is not to win new customers, but to get referrals, and to get more transactions with customers. This is done through the unique experience that customers go through during the guerrilla marketing (such as the Friendship Machine where you rely on someone else to get a bottle of Coca Cola, which results in an overall unique and positive experience), which solidifies their relationship with Coca Cola and make them more likely to be willing ambassadors for the brand.

Also, the advent of social media also allows such guerrilla marketing campaign to go viral on the internet as they are fresh and unique, in stark contrast of regular advertisement. This is turn, kills two birds with one stone.

http://econsultancy.com/ca/blog/63545-behavioural-marketing-and-how-to-get-your-customers-to-love-you

In the blog post by Econsultancy, the author made a great case for improving the personalization of advertising and marketing in order for customers to be more familiar with a certain brand and therefore develop brand loyalty.

In addition to that, the author also gave an example where a customer is more likely to choose a specific shop out of many other shops due to the relationship established with the shopkeeper. I find that there are several problems with this metaphor.

Firstly, the metaphor completely ignores the main problems faced by personalized advertising. The customer decides to continue going to a certain store is because of the personal and human relationship established with the shopkeeper. In the relationship, dialogues can happen between the two and a mutual bond can occur. However, many personalized advertising just display to customers what they want, actively convincing them to buy, buy, buy without actually having an avenue for customers to relate back to the product or have a conversation with people who run the product. Therefore, the differentiation between the metaphor and what actually happens with personalized advertising falls on that front.

Secondly, the problem with personalized advertising is that there is no active and voluntary channel for a customer to explicitly tell what they prefer. In the metaphor, the customer can establish a great commercial relationship with the shopkeeper is mainly due to the fact that the customer consciously tell the shopkeeper what he likes and do not like. Unsimilarly, personalized advertising only gathers information without explicit permission or conscious participation from the customer, which means just a one way relationship. Such relationship of immense power and information that the advertiser has will bring a negative impact on the perception of the customer towards the advertiser, the so called ‘uncanny valley’ which something tries to resemble a human but is not perceived to be human, causing the interaction to be extremely uncomfortable.

Overall, it is important to balance between collecting information and creating a true personal relationship.

Sex sells.

But when is the act of selling a product based on sexual appeal and desires go too far as to insult a particular gender?

This news article is particularly interesting because of the article itself and also the various examples of sex appeal-based advertising further down the article.

What I want to try to do in this blog post is to separate what is so different between the marketing techniques used by the pizza place and the sex based-advertising we see everyday, including the ones included below the article.

First, the big question here will be exclusivity.

The pizza place ultimately couldn’t justify its discrimination in giving away its free products to only females who show their assets, but not males. This act in itself is almost a pure form of gender discrimination and quite clearly, no rational person would find that accetable.

However, are mainstream sex based-advertising really that much more inclusive?
By promoting their products exclusively to the male gender, is it not just one step away from almost exclusively selling your product to the male gender?

Second question is society’s perspective.

The pizza place act drew wide criticism because it almost literally and directly say to females “you pay for the pizza with your breasts”, which likens them to prostitutes. Exchanging sex for money.

While mainstream media is more subliminal about their message, we can still see how it basically does the same thing as the pizza place.
First, they sell products not on its quality, but on sex-appeal of females.
Then, people buy the products, not on its quality, but on the sex-appeal of the advertising.

Do you see what people actually buy now?

Yes, they are buying the ‘sex’ sold by the females in the advertisements, not the products.

While I agree that there are many sides to this argument, unfortunately a blog post of around 300 words cannot accommodate everything. Feel free to comment or reblog this to further the discussion, thanks.

Wilfred.