teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

Every semester I survey my students by asking them to list their three favorite brands on the 4 x 6 card they fill out with personal information.  Every year Nike is the most  popular brand — typically mentioned 2–3 times more than the second place brand.  Can you guess Nike’s prime target market?  You got it college age kids.

Over the last five years Nike has significantly changed its marketing strategy – especially in product development and promotion.  Following the phenomenal success of Nike+ with its all important (for Nike) target market of runners, the firm has invested in developing more digital products.  While many of my generation (I am 51) recall Nike’s great television advertising, the company has moved almost completely away from the big screen, replacing it with small screen options with YouTube virally distributing longer (1 – 3 minute) ads and Facebook building relationships with loyal users.  Fortune magazine provides an extended article describing changes at Nike - ”Nike’s new marketing mojo” (February 13).  To read more Teach the 4 Ps coverage of Nike, click here.   Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

This article might be useful to use when you cover new-product development or advertising and integrated marketing communications.  For those of you using one of our books, you know that we use Under Armour (major Nike competitor) as an opener to our Product chapter.  It might provide a nice contrast to discuss how Nike’s is creating new products that go beyond the shoe.

Twitter’s efforts to build a viable business model have been inconsistent.  Now the micro-blogging service appears to have a formula that is working.  Advertisers are starting to get on board.  Bloomberg BusinessWeek‘s cover story this week offers a closer look at Twitter, see “Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn’t Die” (March 1, 2012).  It seems to me that Twitter needs to figure out how to deliver a more highly targeted audience to advertisers.  The company certainly has access to tons of data on who each user follows and where they click.  I would bet that many of the new employees they are hiring are figuring out how to turn all that data into targeting gold.  A quick overview can be found in the video below.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

One of the most successful marketers of all time is P&G.  The company does its research and testing before deciding whether to launch a new product — and when it does launch, it goes all out.  That doesn’t mean every new product P&G rolls out succeeds.  Eight years ago a prepackaged single-dose laundry detergent tablet, Tide Tabs failed miserably.  Now the powerful Tide brand is trying again with Tide Pods, small dissolvable packages of detergent.  Tide is looking for a premium product in a market where customers are price sensitive.  Tide Pods will cost consumers about 25% more per load of laundry.  Will consumers pay for this new convenience?  This Wall Street Journal article “Tide Rides Convenience Wave” (February 23, 2012, non-subscribers may need to click here) tells the whole story.  In spite of an expert marketer and a big budget, success is no sure thing.  So it could be an interesting class discussion.

This article could be assigned — or the highlights could be covered with a quick in-class overview — and then discussed in class.  You might ask students to discuss the value proposition Tide Pods offer.  Will consumers value convenience enough to pay the higher price? Who should Tide Pods target?  What could they do for promotion?  The image in this post is from the print advertising campaign — and the video below is a TV ad.

Imagine walking along a city street and seeing your own face in ad for a shirt you are checking out.  Or perhaps a friend’s face in an ad inviting you into a restaurant.  Technology may not be too far from making this a possibility.  How creepy would that be? Or perhaps it wouldn’t be creepy at all. Would we get used to it? This Slate article, “How’d My Avatar Get Into That Sneaker Ad?” (January 4, 2012) lays out this type of scenario as a thought experiment.

There are already examples of parts of this technology. My Virtual Model allows you to build an avatar with your body type and face can be placed on a “virtual model” — allowing you to virtually try on clothing. Lands’ End has used this technology for several years now. What is to prevent Facebook ads from using the photos you post to put you in a Facebook ad?  The natural next step, suggested by the article, is that you may walk by a billboard or store and see yourself in an ad.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

It might be fun to engage your students in the same thought experiment described in the article as a way to open a discussion into technology, privacy, and ethics.

Many Western firms have struggled in China — see Home Depot, Dunkin Donuts, and Best Buy as recent examples.  Success, not surprisingly, revolves around effectively adapting a marketing mix for the Chinese consumer.  Today I am offering two case studies that highlight how firms can succeed in China:  the Oreo cookie (see “Rethinking The Oreo For Chinese Consumers“, Planet Money, January 27, 2012) and Starbucks (“Why Starbucks succeeds in China and others haven’t,” USA Today, February 10, 2012).  The Oreo story highlights how the brand has changed consumer habits in China — teaching them how to open the cookie and as well as the practice of dunking cookies in milk (previously unknown in China).  Advertising like the one below, featuring Yao Ming (former NBA star), was key to the campaign.  Both articles share sales data that helps attest to the success of the campaigns.

These examples will play well when you cover international consumer behavior, product adaptation, and retailing.

Well there it was — another Super advertising day — and a good football game to boot.  There are tons of day after opinions on yesterday’s ads, and their insights are probably better than mine.  I looked through a number of sites and wanted to recommend the following.  First, there is the Wall Street Journal, which has its own reader poll and comments from a wide range of advertising experts in “Auto-Industry Ads Score at the Super Bowl” (February 6, 2012 – non-subscribers may need to click here).  The article lauds the “Halftime in America” ad below — while their early poll results favored the Seinfeld/Leno Acura NSX ad (also below).  As of this moment, the USA Today online admeter (not their focus group which reports tomorrow) shows a top five with the two Doritos ads (created in a contest), Bud Light’s “Weego,” M&M’s “Just My Shell,” and Volkswagen’s “Dog Strikes Back.”  You can also find plenty of pundits all over the web, but I found one of the more thoughtful analyses at the Influential Marketing Blog in the post titled “The Best and Worst Of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 2012” (February 6, 2012).

We are coming up on Super Bowl Sunday — the biggest day of the year for the NFL ad agencies.  Many advertising agencies will have their success measured by 300 people who watch the Super Bowl with a dial in hand — and turn that dial up and down as they like/dislike the ad as they watch.  Perhaps like many of you, I like to show and discuss Super Bowl ads in class.  I usually spend about 15 minutes my first teaching day following the Super Bowl to show my students 2-3 of the top ads in the USA Today Ad Meter.  I also show one near the bottom of their rankings.  I ask my students if the top ads are better and why.  I use this to try to get them to realize that ads should be tied to specific objectives.  Is being a “top 10″ ad in popularity on the USA Today Ad Meter a valid objective?  An Advertising Age article, “How USA Today’s Ad Meter Broke Super Bowl Advertising” (January 30, 2012) provides me with a bit more meat for my class discussion next week.

Ikea’s target market includes urban young people — many of whom live in relatively small big-city apartments.  A lot of Ikea’s offerings are optimized to this segment.  One challenge for Ikea is demonstrating how their products make a small apartment bigger.  One way is to create a small apartment in their stores — but to get to more customers, you could bring the small apartment to them.  Ikea knows its urban market often travels on the metro (subway).  So they built a 54 square meter (about 580 square feet) apartment in a Paris metro station.  The apartment’s windows allowed customers to see Ikea’s furniture and cabinets in action.  Five volunteers lived there for a week — they even threw a party.

This is an interesting example of creative promotion.  Ikea got some buzz — so more than just metro riders in one station got to see this.  Will it generate interest?  Sales?  It is a good example of trying to break through the clutter of advertising.

I guess this campaign is more than a year old now — but it is fresh and new to me.  John St is an agency based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  It is hard to call any agency an “ad” agency as most — like John St do all kinds of promotional efforts.  The clever video below demonstrates a wide range of its services in a cute way.  It actually fits as a B2B and B2C example at the same time — and it also demonstrates integrated marketing communications.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

The Wall Street Journal asked some advertising execs what they see coming in 2012 — and you can read about it in “*&%@#! and Other Ads Trends for 2012” (January 4, 2012 – non-subscribers may need to click here) — or by watching the video below.  There are more trends in the article. It might be fun to ask your students — as I have over at Learn the 4 Ps — to choose one of these trends and evaluate its impact on their career planning.  I think it helps for students to learn to scan the environment and watch the future.