teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

The iPhone has considerable market share and mind share among consumers.  So how do you break into that market?  Maybe you start by copying Apple’s iPad and iPhone.  Then you try to differentiate your phone with a larger screen and 4G connection speed.  Of course explaining technical differences in an ad can be a challenge.

So Samsung tries to make fun of Apple diehards with this latest ad.  Does it work?  I would imagine that Apple fans hate it and Apple haters love it — but those two groups are probably not Samsung’s target market with Galaxy (they are already too loyal).  How does it work for smartphone buyers who are not strongly pro- or anti-Apple?

Either way, this is a good example of comparative advertising.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Remember when Apple was known for high prices.  That is no longer the case.  This article provides a nice example that will link to your discussion of skimming and penetration price policies.  In the old days Apple was a niche player known for high prices.  Now it owns some markets (tablet computers, smartphones, portable music players) and benefits from economies of scale.  The company offers even lower prices by keeping older products in its line and offering them for lower prices.  It will be interesting to see how they respond to the new Kindle Fire.  Read more at “Apple’s Lower Prices Are All Part of the Plan” (New York Times, October 23, 2011).  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

I have posted before on the daily deal site (see “Get to Know Groupon,” March 28, 2011).  If you are not up to speed on LivingSocial, Groupon, or other sites, check out that post. As a consumer, I love these promotions — getting half off at a favorite restaurant is hard to pass up.

I have even written a case that I plan to put in the next edition of our books — since it looks like daily deal promotion is here to stay.  I still question the strategy — which is why it makes for a great case — there is room to debate both sides.  The case made for fun discussion on the first day of class and one of my students tells me she works at a local restaurant that swears by LivingSocial coupons. I have previously questioned if a small business really wants these deal-prone consumers — because the deep discounts almost require them to spend more than the coupon or come back again for it to be a profitable promotion.

A second issue relates to the profitability of Groupon and LivingSocial — the two leaders in this space.  There is already a shakeout occurring among daily deal sites.  With such low barriers to entry, I have often wondered if anyone would really make much profit in this space.  One key is differentiation — and LivingSocial, which copied Groupon in the first place, is working at it (see: “LivingSocial Aims to Be Different from Groupon,“ BusinessWeek, September 22, 2011).  Groupon announced its own new product ideas back in March (“Are Four Words Worth $25 Billion for Groupon?” BusinessWeek, March 17, 2011), but I have not heard if these are working.  For a variety of reasons, Groupon’s IPO has been delayed.

I have been reading a lot of articles this week about the new line of Amazon Kindles.  The most intriguing of these is the Kindle Fire which appears to provide a worthy competitor to the Apple iPad.  While more limited, the Fire is also less than half the price.  The best article I have found on the new Kindles is from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “Amazon, the Company That Ate the World” (September 28, 2011).  This article, while long, really digs into the marketing strategy angle from Amazon’s perspective.  It also provides a nice compare and contrast of the marketing strategies of Amazon and Apple — two companies that are bound to have a big impact on American business for many years to come.  The article is also very relevant given our recent post titled “Tablets Drive Online Shopping” (September 30). The article also provides an update to the case scenario on Amazon that opens chapter 3 in each of our books.  We have also posted this at Learn the 4 Ps.

This article provides examples you might find useful when you cover price, competition, marketing strategy planning, new product development or retailing.
 

Increased competition results in the need for more sophisticated marketing tools.  This article describes the pressure on many college athletic teams (particularly the big revenue sport of football) to sell more tickets.  A growing number of college athletic departments have turned to telemarketing — many outsourcing the task to a specialist firm with commissioned salespeople.  Many of our students will be interested in the context, but it might also be interesting to talk about the fine line that many colleges have to walk with respect to their marketing efforts.  Read “Marketers reshape how college teams sell tickets” (USA Today, Auguts 5, 2011).

This article and example could be used as a first day of class marketing example as students could relate to the context, or use it when you discuss competition or personal selling.

I love Yelp.  My family just returned from vacation and we found Yelp enormously helpful in identifying restaurants and activities.  We would simply pull out the smartphone, click on Yelp, type in what we wanted to do (“restaurants seafood” or simply that we wanted to eat) — and a list of restaurants would appear in order of how close they were to our current position.  Plus, most of the restaurants included a collective rating and individual reviews.  Yelp steered us right and we discovered some great local places.  We also used TripAdvisor.com to help us identify activities and hotels before our vacation.  I rely a great deal on reviews in my buying process.

These sites rely on the wisdom of crowds — but are all these reviews “real”?  Apparently there is a growing market for posting fake reviews — good ones for your company and even bad ones for the competition.  Our text books include an ethics scenario addressing this exact issue. Sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor rely on our trust in these reviews — so they are concerned about this trend.  This article “A Rave, a Pan or Just a Fake?” (New York Times, May 21, 2011) gives you a bit more insight into how this works and how Yelp is trying to fight it.

In our books we discuss reviews in a new publicity section which covers a wide range of social media.  The article could provide some background when you discuss the ethics exercise in the first promotion chapters in our books — or when you cover reviews and social media.

Audi probably doesn’t have the same reputation as its more well known competitors — BMW, Mercedes, and Lexus — in the luxury car market.  Comparative advertising can be a good strategy for a less popular brand.  I think Audi has done a nice job with this ad — it is simple yet effective.  What do you think?  With the Microsoft-Apple and Verizon-AT&T comparative advertising battles a bit stale by now, maybe this new ad can be shown in class when you talk about competition or types of advertising.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Many of my students are interested in and knowledgeable about the sports apparel and athletic shoe.  Surveys I conduct with my students consistently identify Nike as their favorite brand — far ahead of Apple.  So it pays to be up-to-date on this product-market — in this case about Nike competitor Puma.  It also makes for a good example to use in positioning.  The article, “Puma Is No Longer a Sneaker.  It’s a Lifestyle” (Bloomberg Businessweek, May 12, 2011) describes French luxury house PPR’s efforts to reposition the brand as high fashion.  Will the strategy work?  It might be useful to ask students why Puma is taking this approach.  Clearly there are strong competitors in Nike, Adidas, Reebok and Under Armour in this market — so it may make sense to try to differentiate Puma.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

You may have heard the news last week that Diet Coke snuck past Pepsi for #2 on the soft drink sales rankings – the Wall Street Journal‘s coverage of this is here in “Diet Coke Wins Battle in Cola Wars,” (March 17, 2011 – non-subscribers click here).   Coke and Pepsi provide us with many good examples — including their battle as a good example of competition.

Pepsi has been criticized for some of its recent marketing moves – see “How Pepsi Blinked, Fell Behind Diet Coke” (Advertising Age, March 21, 2011 — this may require a subscription to access).  For more, see “Pepsi Thirsty for a Comeback,” (Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2011 – non-subscribers may have to click here) you can read more about Pepsi’s fall and future plans. The 3:15 video below also provides a quick overview.

Seth Godin recently had a nice post “On pricing power” (February 17, 2011) at his blog.  I have little to add — I just suggest you read it because I think you will like it.