Camelot marketing strategy

Since Camelot, the UK National Lottery operator doubled its ticket price from £1 to £2, it has launched solutions to face backlash. Camelot recently launched an advertising campaign to build a more reciprocal relationship with consumers. Camelot also expands its branch to Internet; it encourages consumers to join its Facebook group, and make original theme songs onto YouTube.

 

According to Principles of Accounting, a good manager should invest significant effort in developing strategy to achieve business goal in a fair way consistent with core values and brand positioning.

 

Camelot firstly increased ticket price, and then launched friendly campaign to strengthen its bond with retailers and consumers. Though it seems like a sugar coat activity, it actually worked; in my opinion, it is a smart marketing strategy, which would increase lottery sale due to the relatively inelastic demand, and establish stronger brand loyalty. What’s more, with the force of social media, it will definitely enlarge its brand impact, and penetrate the friendly and beneficial brand image into minds.

 

From which, we can obviously see that the managerial and marketing departments are very sophisticated and efficient both in responding to reactions from consumers and the market, and in planning for success.

 

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/camelot-seeks-to-create-more-reciprocal-shopper-marketing/4008080.article

Instagram’s plan to roll out ad

Instagram revealed its plan to roll out photo and video ad of high quality to US users.  Apart from some critics about this decision, it is not surprise at all considering that Instagram is a large-user-base product of Facebook whose advertising revenue weighs a lot.

This reminds me of Twitter’s increasing reliance on advertisers.  As revealed by its IPO filings, over half of the revenue is from advertising, while it aims to have new ad formats in order to expand its foothold in the competition for advertisers.

However, sometimes businesses focus too much on expanding revenue and profits to pay attention to users experience.  Ad with bad or incongruous contents and design, or too much ad can easily rouse users’ rage and push users to competitors, which would be an act of “committing suicide” with no doubt. Facebook, for example, once faced the backlash from users due to too much in-feed ad.

Therefore, keeping a delicate balance among user experience, company’s goal (most of time is to increase profits), and the brand value position, appeals to be a way forward.

 http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/instagram-to-slowly-roll-out-advertising/4008121.article

http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/twitter-to-increase-marketer-education-and-ad-formats-to-secure-long-term-future/4008119.article

 

Cadbury lost trademark battle

Cadbury, a British confectionary company, established in Birmingham in 1824, is best known for its products the Dairy Milk, which is the bestselling product in Cadbury’s history.  Recently, Cadbury lost the five-year legal battle to trademark its chocolate bars purple. (see http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/04/cadbury-dairy-milk-purple-trademark-blocked) It leads us to reconsider the definition of distinctive brand image and the boundary of protection of intellectual property.

 

The exclusive use of brand color is not reasonable, because the brand image, as a whole, most of the time is not only a pure color block, but the permutation of different colors, patterns, logos, etc. To Cadbury, the color purple means a lot, which informs the world that it is a historic, somehow survived WWI, with certain links to Britain Loyal, and reliable quality. It is Cadbury’s value proposition. As Al Ries and Jack Trout stresses in their book, Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, it is really important to get into the mind of the consumers. From my perspective, it would be more effective if Cadbury consistently set the Pantone 2685C (the purple shade) over its wide range of products, so that consumers would spontaneously think of Cadbury chocolate bars whenever they see the purple color.