Despite the generally positive buzz around Target, the giant America retailer has taken a big stumble in Canada.

I was really surprised when I read this blog discussing how badly Target is doing in Canada. As a consumer, I was quite eager to check out the new stores. I also distinctly remember seeing Target ads on the side of a Canada Line skytrain car. It seemed like Target thoroughly did their homework before they invested in Canada.

However, not only were there product shortages at launch, but their poorly designed website was heavily criticized.

Nonetheless, the key problem was pricing – Target couldn’t match the prices that they had in their stores in the US. Thus, the Canadian stores could be perceived as a worse “spinoff” compared to the American version. I wonder how this will affect the brand perception of Target Canada? And how long does bad press and publicity last for?

It’s questionable that even though Target knew (or should have known) about important environmental factors (such as: many Canadian cities are close to the States) that they still couldn’t fill the knowledge gap between them and the customers. Customer want cheap prices and Target brand goods that they expected from US stores and Target couldn’t achieve either of them. Frankly, it’s embarrassing for the 2^nd largest America discount retailer to make critical mistakes in expanding markets.

As an employee of AMS Safewalk, I believe that the service has really stepped up, largely through effective marketing.

In light of the recent sexual assaults on UBC campus, from a “business” standpoint, Safewalk has achieved the goal of growing new and current customer bases by improving satisfaction and raising awareness.

The cause for such a spike in demand was due to the sexual assaults on campus – all of a sudden, Safewalk had very high value to female individuals on campus who need to get around at night. From the perspective of an individual of Safewalk’s target market, the service provides a perfectly inelastic service (because people generally fear assaults), and it is free.

Again, looking at Safewalk  as a company (even though they are a AMS funded service)

They effectively used the 4 P’s:

Place: Call from anywhere on campus and get picked up, or go to the office at the SUB.

Price: Free. Students love free.

Promotion: Posters in every residence and many buildings, giant TV screen advertising, pamplets, boothing, news reports and newspapers, the service itself (walkers promote person to person advertising), and even on Translink buses (announcement at the end of the 99 prompts you to call Safewalk).

Product: Safewalk has incorporated more walking teams per night, longer operating hours, and even a car!

All in all, fear culture created the perceived value and Safewalk captured, communicated, and delivered the service that customers (people on campus) wanted, which benefited society at large.

Maddi Koop’s blog post “You Are What You ‘LIKE’”

Upon reading Maddi’s blog post – “You Are What You LIKE”, I was immediately intrigued to try it myself. How it works is that the application to gathers your facebook data and then analyzes it to generate an estimated report on your personality.

I was very impressed by the results. As Maddi mentioned, the program must have a very complex data mining and matching algorithm.

Although I agree in general that the ethics of this program seems sketchy, we can note that Facebook’s privacy policy outlines what they do with everyone’s information. Outlined in the policy, Facebook states that they can use their data for advertising. This basically means we’re voluntarily giving up our personal information to be used for marketing.

Looking past the ethics, from the standpoint of companies this data could be extremely useful. In a world of value-based marketing, companies can target people who are in their specific target market.

Last summer when I vacationed in Europe, I was surprised to see personalized names on Coca Cola bottles everywhere.

I immediately though this was a fantastic idea because having your name on a bottle means the product is more scarce and unique. This adds value influencing you to buy it because what is limited is always better.

This campaign also spreads Coke’s brand with word of mouth, because people may buy a personalized coke for their friends, family members, and even significant others (romantic partners).

I was particularly impressed by how Coke utilised marketing beyond satisfying physiological needs (thirst) like how they usually do (and have consistently done so in the past) and targeted love/belonging, social, and esteem needs. Below is an effective example because I may think that buying a personalized Coke for someone may lead to me getting a boyfriend/girlfriend.

Travelling to multiple countries in Europe, I was further impressed by how Coca Cola adapted to country differences by adapting their bottle names to names that were more popular in the local area. They really had to understand each country’s cultural differences  to be able to pull off a successful campaign.

All of this ties in with value-based marketing which Coca Cola does very well.

Finally, seeing this campaign really made me wonder why Canada or at least specifically Vancouver doesn’t have this. If Coca Cola targeted highly individualistic “Western” countries, then why did they not target Canada and the US as well? Interestingly enough, Coke has launched a similar campaign in China.

Deep down, there may just not be enough demand for it in North America, or Coke may still be in the process of creating the plan. What do you think?