Before taking Comm 296, my understanding of the word ”marketing” was like a group of people sitting in a meeting room and designing a big, colorful poster of one of their new products —- Now, I know it is just part of advertising instead of the whole term of marketing.

Today, I think marketing is more likely a plan of the company’s future. Every single company, big or small, lives on a certain market or markets. Good businesses see a step ahead, and this is implemented, from my view, by marketing. A current profitable product does not mean the company could relay on it for a long time. Sometimes it’s even deceptive. I got my own experience of the farmers in my hometown. They used to grow rice in a small scare. In 2010, the economic was recovering from the 2009 depression, so the price of rice start to grow up as well. The farmers saw it as a solid trend that rice could continue to be profitable for them. Everyone start to grow rice. They reclaimed the citrus land, the soybeans grand, to grow rice. In 2011, due to the impact of import rice to the market. Their rice was unsalable and the farmers suffer a serious lost.

If they could imply some marketing knowledge and research on the market trend, such suffer might be avoidable. The marketing plan is broken down into various components—what product should be invested on (in this case, the most important one), how much it should cost, where and how it will be promoted, and how it will get to the consumer.

After all, I do leaned some useful, proactive aspects in this course. And thank Ms. Tamar for her professional presentations.

“We are team 7!!”I would say I appreciate all of my marketing teammates in this semester. We worked together for 3 insightful marketing assignments. Particularly, we spent tones of time working on the Video project, and we enjoyed it. For me, it was a great learning opportunity for not only marketing research but also knowledge on media production as well as how to work as a team.

I learned that a clear outline has to be set up before pursuing any big progress. That was our first time touching video production. At first, we didn’t even know how to save the work! There were so much unknowns and crossroads: form of expression, content, even whether making video first or audio. To solve all of these problems, we decided to have a meeting before getting started.  On the meeting, we achieved consensus that an outline, in writing, should be firstly done before we move on to the technique things. We assigned work to each group member so that everyone could bring his or her ideas about the content. We hoped by doing that we did not need to worry about what to say but only how to show.

I learned to compromise. We did have so many difficulties creating that video. One was that I preferred more drawing appear in the video because I thought drawing was the easiest way to express our various ideas especially when we did not have any technique background. Yet one my teammate thought drawing tended to be boring. He preferred clipping existing video online and scream recording. We could not convince each other but we decide to mix the two methods and continually check the victual effects at every step.

Next time, if we got a chance to do another marketing video, I would make use of more the equipment and technical support from CLC. They had great resources available but we just don’t know how to use them. We did not use the “E-being” very much, and we did not use a lot of functions in the software, which I believe could make the video amazing.  A great marketer, not only for producing videos but also in other marketing activities in general, like advertising, should know how to make use of our resources effectively. Mr. Jim Connolly brought this insight to me in his blog titled “What do you do with your resources” http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2013/03/30/what-do-you-do-with-your-resources/in which he pointed out marketers usually do not fully make use of their available resources.

It has been a half way to success for a marketing group as they reach the step of  promotion. They’ve got great product. They’ve had right, easy-reaching target market. All they need to do is just to somehow “motivate” or “impress” customers to see the product and spend money on it. But is it that simple?

I think marketing promotion has three levels.

The lowest level, and probably the simplest one is offering discounting. By cutting down profit per unit, sellers seek to increase the sales volume dramatically and such increase in volume should cover the lost of unit profit. The reason why I think discounting is a method of promotion which is on the lowest level is that sellers in this case have to face a risk of raising the  overall profit. The lost of unit earning might be covered by the increased sales, or it might not. Truly, “It’s on sale” is a quite common saying when management faces problems of promotion; yet there tend to be “smarter” ways.

The middle level, like I saw in another student’s blog https://blogs.ubc.ca/shiyutang/author/shiyutang/, is to deliver some interesting emails or running impressive advertisement towards customers. It could be, like Molly said in her blog, quite eye-catching.(she talked about E-commerce but I think it applied to other marketing strategies as well.) However, I question the response of target costumers as we may not really care about what it says in one of hundreds of junk-mails, under this age of information overabundance.

Promotion is not limited to “sales” only. The highest level of promotion, in my view, should jump beyond this. It could be about building customer relationship by introducing and inviting people to  community activities, spending budget on public welfare advertisement in relative field, or even just telling an interesting story —- about anything. By doing marketing promotion this way, the company is seeking long term development within the industry. And the first thing, they know, is to make customers happy. The following is a great example from Coca-Cola which insight me:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_blyvSCPg

When doing an STP plan, a question comes up when it moves from segmenting step to targeting—–which segment should a company choose to pressure on? My understanding is simple: choose the segment on which the company already has some advantage factors.

Given an example of Apple.  Apple is known by its electronic products like smartphone, laptop, tablet pc, etc. Obviously, Apple gets technical and marketable advantages in this field. Imagine now Apple tends to enter the TV market. What kind of television Apple would sell and what kind of customers Apple tends to sell to? By segmenting the potential market, it would be best for Apple to develop a high-technique TV that could attract its current customers, such as young people and technique-likers. The product could be able to connect with current Apple devices like iPhone, iMac and acoustics. Apple could gain competitive advantages at the beginning. However, if Apple targeting the segment that required competing with those traditional TV producers like Sony, feature by feature (i.e. large-size high definition display, which Sony and other big TV producers have been developing for years), Apple would likely lost its advantage and therefore, such targeting were unsuccessful.

In other industries like supermarket, customers would not expect to buy luxury products like expensive watch in a supermarket. So as the markers of a supermarket should be smart to target low cost but various products available for customer in order to have some sense of competitive advantage. I mention this because of my own experience. I used to see expensive watches selling for 300 dollars at Costco. I think that was an bed example of targeting because the potential buyers of luxury watches are not identifiable and reachable for Costco.

I do receive tongs of spams every week. Telus and Shaw, the case we talked about in class, is one of them. It seems that companies in tertiary industry would focus more directly on customers as they tend to expand. As a Shaw customer, Telus offers me amazingly good deal which would likely make me change my internet provider immediately as you look at the numbers on their leaflet. And I know Shaw would have done the same thing: actually they just did it and that’s how I became Shaw’s customer.

For a company like Shaw or Telus, giving customers favorable terms is the most popular method to grab new customers from competitors. Others, like a restaurant, their business isn’t built on contract signed with customers so they would probably focus on the qualified service they provide, like a new menu, newly renovated tables and chairs, and so on.

Although entering new markets quite depends on customers, other factors also matter. For companies in the primary and secondary industry, like manufacturing companies, expanding their market share would more likely depend on the technical factors. A great example is Apple. Apple also value a lot on customer service but the “killer”is still technology. They keep their market share and ensure the increase of new customers by inputting a great number of money as the R&D funding. The result is obvious. Apple continually publish new product yearly, or sometimes monthly.  Here is the link talking about the new coming iphone 5s: http://www.knowyourcell.com/news/1795011/apple_budget_iphone_5s_patent_revealed.html

In conclusion, as I mentioned, no matter a company relies directly on customers like Telus or indirectly attracts customers by new technology, the key point is always the people who are willing to reach into pockets for you. To clarify it, just think about what’s at the center of the situational analysis diagram.

Advertising is simple: Tell buyers the worth of the goods and services in a persuasive language—- and make them reach into the pocket. Advertisements play a great roll in marketing, I think, however some of them do have ethical issues as they are given to the public.

It is too easy for marketing people to design a “good, effective” advertisement which, probably not all based on truth…..Because the way people get those information is so wide. Buyers saw, hear, smell and even been insinuated before buying the product—–too much to regulate the selling side. It’s more about psychology, then a simple legal problem.

1. Misleading:

EasyTone Shoes

This shoe company was forced to refund more than $25 million in purchases because of misleading buyers in ads.The ads claimed that laboratory tests had found that Tone shoes were “proven to work your hamstrings and calves up to 11% harder and tone your butt up to 28% more than regular sneakers … just by walking!” Apparently, the special uneven sole of the shoe forced you to use more muscles when you moved. Later, an investigation found that the only thing that EasyTone shoes actually did was make it uncomfortable to walk.

2.What is promise is not in the performance of the product:

In minutes?hours? or never?

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