Hello and welcome to “Teach the 4 Ps” a blog for marketing instructors and people interested in reading about marketing. The blog came about after Bill Perreault and I (Joe Cannon) developed a newsletter (Teach the 4Ps) for instructors using our text books – Essentials of Marketing and Basic Marketing. The newsletter is designed to give instructors current articles, websites, viral videos, and online advertisements – with comments suggesting how they could be used in teaching the introductory marketing course. We all know our students like current examples, so Bill and I want to provide more for users of our books. We received many positive comments on the newsletter – so we decided to share our ideas with anyone teaching marketing or interested in marketing. We hope you will share back – and give us comments and ideas on the blog.
For several reasons, this resource is even more valuable in a blog:
It makes the newsletter interactive – we hope you will offer comments on our posts.
We post almost every day – making everything that much more current.
The blog format makes it easy to find J.I.T. (just in time) examples for your classes. For example, say are you teaching pricing this week – click on “Price” in categories to the right and you will have a listing of only those blog posts that have something to do with price.
So, please take a look around. We are kicking this off with more than 80 posts already up. Let us know what you think? Do you have ideas about how we might make this resource even more valuable? Click on the headline above and add your comments (or read those of others).
For a nice green example of segmentation and targeting, see “Electric Car Strategy: Follow the Fleet,” (The New York Times, March 1, 2010). Definitely shows how to tie characteristics of the market (technology, customers, company, and competition) to the target market.
None of us likes to receive telemarketing calls — much less talk about them in class. But for B2B, it can be a cost-effective medium for seller and buyer. Sometimes we need to be reminded of this and how to do it better (”A return to telemarketing in b-to-b,” B2B, March 1, 2010).
This is a question many marketing managers are asking today. One of our own, Utpal Dholakia, Associate Professor of Marketing at Rice University investigated that question — and it appears that “Facebook changed customer behavior for the better.” The quick and dirty answer is here on Fast Company. A longer discussion and better description of the experimental design can be found here at Harvard Business Review. HBR is the better source, but I was not sure if registration was required to see it. both articles are short and to the point. Thanks for a great study of a timely issue Utpal.
This might be a good example of an experiment that could be used with market research or some useful data when talking about Facebook or other social media in Promotion.
I found this OK Go (a music group by the way) video online about a week ago. I forget how I learned about the video. It was interesting and I showed it before of of my classes (at almost four minutes it was too long for me to want to show during class — so I let it run while I handed out some papers). Anyway, I never noticed that it was actually sponsored by State Farm until I read this BusinessWeek article, “Inside the OK Go / State Farm Deal” (March 3, 2010). Is this a good marketing strategy? Personally, I don’t think so. I believe that efforts at viral video should have some fit with the brand — I don’t really get the State Farm connection. I guess the objective could be to raise awareness — but does State Farm need more awareness. Besides, the first time I watched the video I did not even notice the State Farm sponsorship.
You can decide if you want to show it in class — might be a nice break in the middle of a long lecture. It is fun to watch and you could ask students after if it makes them feel different about State Farm.
Have you been following Zappos over the last few years? Well we have. The online retailer (not just selling shoes anymore) is known for its “Wow” customer service and quirky culture (see “Zappos knows how to kick it,” Fortune, January 22, 2010). They have recently come out with a new television advertising campaign (see below) and they are moving into video sharing. Looking for more? Link through to read more about Zappos and its founder, CEO and “2009 SUCCESS Achiever of the Year,” (Success Magazine, March 2, 2010) Tony Hsieh.
I like to talk about Zappo’s when I get into retailing. I like to show students how one or two retailers have developed marketing strategies that work — and walk through the target market and four Ps. I start by confessing to my students that fifteen years ago I told students that shoes would probably never be sold over the Internet because of the need to try them on (what did I know?).
You can walk through the marketing strategy — starting with big efforts at customer retention — so a major target is current customers. Especially with shoe buyers, customer retention is key — since their returns will be much lower than new customers. They keep customers with phenomenal customer service. Prices are reasonable. For Promotion, the great customer service generates word of mouth. Promotion also utilizes advertising (see example below — that probably targets new targets and customer acquisition) and now I can add a discussion of online video. Place befits a quick tour of the Zappos website – where you can demonstrate more Promotion with the customer reviews of several products. you can also talk about free shipping and returns when you are talking about Place policies. And Product is interesting as the firm has a very wide selection and now sells a lot more than shoes.
This article (”McDonald’s: the world’s local restaurant,” The Times Online, February 9, 2010) provides some great examples on how successful global firms tweak marketing strategies to better appeal to local markets. While much of the article is about McDonalds in the UK, there are other examples as well. This would provide examples for talking about international in general, or in combination with lectures about retailing or product.
I know that I need this reminder once in a while. Check out this short summary over at The Teaching Professor of “Characteristics of Good Teachers” (March 2, 2010).
Occasionally we need a reminder like this: based on a thorough literature review, Paul Ramsden, a noted researcher on teaching and learning, along with several co-authors offered this description of good teachers.
I love this new campaign for Tropicana in Canada. The brand is launching a new juice Tropicana Essentials with added calcium and vitamin D (the sunshine vitamin). Tropicana’s ad agency, BBDO Canada, found a great way to portray the campaign’s slogan “Brighter Mornings Brighter Days.” Proclaiming itself Canada’s National Provider of Brighter Mornings, Tropicana spent a month in Inuvik, one of Canada’s northernmost towns, where 3500 residents live without the sun for several weeks every winter. The television commercial (see below) was supplemented with a Facebook page, and a behind the scenes blog. For more details link to this article.
The ad provides a nice example of international marketing (for us non-Canadians anyway) — because I think that Canadians have an understanding (maybe with our Scandanavian friends) of the short days of winter. I will show it when I talk about integrated marketing communications or advertising. It provides a nice example of how advertising supports a positioning objective.
Users of our text books know that we have a great chapter opening case scenario for chapter 2 that describes Cirque du Soleil. I was doing some research on Cirque today and found some great videos. There is a short (0:41) video at the Cirque du Soleil website. And at YouTube I found several longer (4-8 minute) videos. I liked this one the best. If you use our books, I suggest showing the short video (or an excerpt from this longer video) to introduce Cirque du Soleil and describe its marketing strategy planning process.
FedEx is targeting small businesses with a series of web parodies. One commentator in the Wired article “TV Ad Powerhouse FedEx Woos Small Biz with Web Parodies” (FEbruary 26, 2010) wonders how well this will work. I watched a couple of the 3 minute videos — they are kind of funny and educate customers on FedEx services at the same time (not an easy task). They are modest budget productions and the media costs are zero. The videos I saw had anywhere from 20,000 to more than 400,000 views. At this point, the payback from the use of YouTube and other social media is hard to predict, but there is only one way to find out and that is through experimentation.
The video is a versatile example of many marketing concepts. It is always nice to have clear, understandable B2B examples. The video shows how FedEx tailors its strategy for the small business target market and could fit with chapter 2’s discussion of strategy planning and chapter 4’s coverage of segmentation and targeting. The video might also be shown with a lecture on organizational buying, where we talk about service businesses. Finally, it also fits with integrated marketing communications and advertising on the web.
