The video and article allow you to walk through the marketing strategy planning process with your students.  Here are some ideas:

• Customers: You can highlight customer needs – many don’t really need the high performance promoted by Nike and Under Armour.  Puma figured they could address the needs of the “after hours athlete.”
• Company:  You can briefly highlight some of Puma’s strengths (solid brand, good distribution, design reputation) and weaknesses (not as much money or strong a brand as major competitors)
• Competitors:  Nike, Under Armour, Adidas — all strong brands with deep pockets.  Each of these competitors also focuses on the hard core weekend warrior (or wannabe).
• Segmentation:  the video gives you an idea about how Puma segments and who they target.
• Differentiation and Positioning:  Puma clearly chooses to position itself as a fun fashion accessory.
• The video gives some examples of product and place decisions — but the focus is on promotion.  The brief highlighting of TV, print, outdoor, and online efforts provides a nice example of integrated marketing communications.

All that — plus a market my students can relate to — this is a winning video clip.  I hope you and your students enjoy it as much as we did.

Often times marketers will just stick their product into a game just to build awareness — even if there is no connection to the brand.  At least in this case Bounty’s appearance in the game reinforces its positioning.  Players who unlock rolls of Bounty towels are able to clean more quickly than the standard paper towels.  They can also unlock a Bounty janitor who is 30% more effective at cleaning than the regular janitor.  A tie-in with Facebook helped Bounty gain more than 500,000 new fans at its Facebook page (how can more than 1.2 million people “like” a brand of paper towlels on Facebook?).  Read more at “P&G’s Bounty Picks Up Fans From Social Gaming” (AdAge, June 30, 2011)

Nike is aggressively going after youth action sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, trick-bicycling and others – see “Nike Tries to Enter the Niche Sports It Has Missed” (New York Times, June 1, 2011).  Nike’s tactics in these markets are in many ways similar to those it has used in other markets — employing top athletes in each sport to endorse the brand and support it ith dynamite advertising that appeals to its target market.  The video below was released on Facebook (where Nike has specialty pages for various sports) even before it launched on network TV (during the NBA finals).  Nike created the Nike 6.0 sub-brand (see its Facebook page here) just for the action sports market.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

This short article “In-Store Marketing on the Rise” (Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2011, non-subscribers click here) includes excerpts from an interview with Dina Howell who heads up Saatchi & Saatchi X, a unit dedicated to shopper marketing.  Howell previously worked in this area at P&G an early leader in point-of-purchase and other in-store promotion.  One of her key points is the importance of making sure in-store is consistent with other mediums — integrated marketing communications.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

The article and report throw around a lot of percentages, but I am always wary of using the percentages that are thrown around in these studies.  For one thing this sample starts with Internet users.  Second, this study was conducted by a firm in the “search” business.  With those qualifications in mind, you can still see that search and social media are playing an increasingly important role in the purchase decision process.  I believe that our text books have too much emphasis on outbound promotional activities — like advertising and personal selling — but this report suggest we need to have more understanding of social media and search.  The recent edition of Basic Marketing cranks up our coverage in those areas.

Plenty of good results reported as well — in one year:  1) users uploaded more than 13,000 photos, 2) posted more than 120,000 comments, 3) more than 500,000 people participated in the group or used the app at the social network, and 4) sales grew 30% over the year.

Great example of social media, integrated marketing communications, in an international market.

Clearasil: 4cab36b21ac140.39603595 from BeesAwards on Vimeo.

Some good examples that might be useful when discussing social media, integrated marketing communications — even promotion measurement.