teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

“Skechers USA Inc. will pay $40 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that the footwear company made unfounded claims that its Shape-ups shoes would help people lose weight and strengthen their butt, leg and stomach muscles. Kardashian, Burke and other celebrities endorsed the shoes in Skechers ads.  (USA Today, May 17, 2012)

This case provides a current example of deceptive advertising.

With Facebook going public this week, there is a lot of talk about whether its advertising works.  Since the social network’s valuation is based on an uncertain business model, that is a good question.  But we are not here to evaluate the worthiness of the investment in the stock — instead let’s look at whether Facebook ads make sense for marketing managers.

GM offers one answer to that question in  “GM Says Facebook Ads Don’t Pay Off” (Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2012, non-subscribers click here).  A case study reported by NPR found equally dubious results – “Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook.  How’d It Do?” (Planet Money Blog, May 16, 2012).

Any in-class discussion should distinguish between the various ways brands can use Facebook.  Marketers can create a Facebook fan page and invite customers to “like” the page.  After liking the page, posts to that page appear in that person’s news feed.  The cost to the marketer is to create the page and keep it up — but there is no media cost.  There is also no revenue to Facebook, so the firm has developed other types of advertising. In theory and probably some time in the future, Facebook knows so much about users (through elaborate analysis of likes, posts, photos, the user’s network, etc.) that it can target customers.

Ask students if they ever click on Facebook ads?  Ask if they have “Liked” any brands — and if they read the brands’ posts in their news feed?   What messages appeal to them?  Why?  What can Facebook offer advertisers?  The articles I posted above tend to discount the role of advertising in brand building.  These questions are also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Getting back to the question in the headline:  well, the jury is still out.  Certainly a lot of investors buying Facebook stock are hoping that the company finds a formula to make it work.

This Bloomberg BusinessWeek article, “Coming Soon to Your Desktop at Work:  Ads” (April 19) exposed me to new media useful in targeting highly specialized B2B markets – including doctors, accountants, and IT professionals.  The software is free to the user, in exchange for watching ads.  Advertisers pay up to $200 per thousand views — almost 20 times what they pay for Facebook ads.

This provides a nice B2B example when you talk about segmentation and targeting, media or advertising.  The business model also could be used as an example of an alternative pricing model for software.

According to “Mountain Dew Wants Some Street Cred” (Bloomberg Businessweek, April 26, 2012) Mountain Dew accounts for 20% of PepsiCo’s US soft drink sales.  The brand is especially popular in the southeastern part of the country — even outselling Coca Cola in convenience stores in Coke’s home state of Georgia.  Mountain Dew’s customer demographics skew to young whites – a slow growth demographic.  So the company has been trying to reach out to young Latinos and blacks.

This short article touches on many different elements of marketing — demographics, targeting, new product development, and advertising.  You could describe the demographic issue in a couple of slides, show the ad below — part of the new “This is How We Dew” campaign — and then ask students what else Mountain Dew could do to appeal to these new target markets.  We have also posted this over at Learn the 4 Ps.

In our text books (see chapter 15 in Essentials and 16 in Basic Marketing), we use the results of Nielsen’s 2009 “Global Trust in Advertising Study” to demonstrate the importance of public relations and social media in the promotion blend.  Now the results of the 2011 “Global Trust in Advertising Study” has been released.  This survey of 28,000 people from around the world shows that consumesr trust recommendations from friends and online reviews much more than various sources of advertising.  The results provide a nice segue to social media and help explain why marketers are increasingly moving communications budgets in this direction.  The latest results (released just last week, but collected during 2011 ) don’t differ significantly from the 2009 study.  But you might want to present more updated results to your students.

OK, it is a bit sexist, but so is a lot of advertising.  I like that it speaks directly to its target audience — the 18-40 year old male.

You might find this graphic fun to show in class when you cover advertising.  As with most good jokes, there is a ring of truth to it — and I think that many of my students believe the “friends” panel.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Who better to tell us about the keys to getting videos to go viral than YouTube’s own trends manager — Kevin Allocca.  While Allocca’s doesn’t specifically reference advertising videos, his three lessons would certainly have application.  You might show this in class and ask students how marketing managers can use Alloca’s lessons to enhance the spread of viral promotions.

This short “film” — it is so beautiful and elaborately portrayed that “video” doesn’t seem to be the correct term — brilliantly conveys Cartier’s positioning and branding.  The French jeweler and watchmaker’s heritage is on display.   Worth a showing when you cover positioning, retailing, branding, or promotion.

I love this two minute video ad for the Guardian — one of Britain’s tabloid newspapers. Britain’s tabloids are known for their dogged pursuit of lurid stories.  Here they turn a familiar fairy tale on its head.  It does all this while subtly demonstrating all that is great about the Guardian — online video reporting, the latest news stories, comments from readers, and more.