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“Why Bertolli Is Using Webisodes to Promote Frozen Dinners” (Brandweek, March 4, 2010) is the text of an interview with Gaston Vaneri, the marketing director who oversees Unilever’s U.S. frozen food business.  Vaneri provides a nice explanation of Bertolli’s rationale for this campaign — which can be viewed at www.intotheheartofitaly.com — feature some celebrities head to Italy and learn about Italian food.

What happens when Rocco DiSpirito, Marisa Tomei, and Dan Cortese travel to Italy to unlock the secrets of Italian Passion for food and life and uncover the inspiration behind Bertolli Frozen Meals? The new web series – Into The Heart of Italy!

It might be fun to show one of the webisodes and then discuss why Bertolli is doign this type of marketing.  With the insights from the article and your own thoughts, it could lead to an engaging discussion on Promotion.

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.

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.

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.

Another study questioning the value of demographics described in AdWeek, “Are Demographics Dead? Study suggests looking at ‘life stages’ could yield greater insight” (February 23, 2010).

Media behavior in today’s fragmented landscape is best evaluated by looking at the “life stages” that people experience as opposed to their demographic profiles.

We are not quite ready to drop demographics from our text books, but as users of Basic Marketing and Essentials of Marketing know, we consider the family life cycle (see chapter 5) an important influence on consumer behavior.

Seth Godin is great and I always enjoy following his blog.  In this blog post, “The brand, the package, the story, and the worldview,” Godin offers advice to African chocolate maker Madecasse on how putting a story on its package might help its sales.  Could be a good example, or turned into a mini case for discussion.

I am becoming more and more a believer in the power of stories.  I think they help in marketing and for teaching marketing.  If you are interested in learning more about stories, you might read Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind:  Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future” (this morning I listened to the “Story” chapter on my way in to work) or the Heath brothers “Made to Stick.“  I know we all use stories (extended examples) to supplement our teaching, but what I am reading has me thinking about how I can develop better stories.

Kellogg Professor Derek Rucker and his MBA students evaluated ads based on their ability to achieve strategic objectives — sure beats the popularity contests we usually have.  You can hear what Derek has to say in this BusinessWeek video

The day after the Super Bowl there are plenty of pundits ready to crown the best and worst ads shown during yesterday’s game.  Plus, there are plenty of sites dedicated to crowning fan favorites — see “Super Bowl Ads 2010” at the Wall Street Journal (I don’t think you need a subscription here), which as of this writing ranks the Audi “Green Car” as tops based on the votes of WSJ readers.   Probably the grand daddy of Super Bowl ratings, the USA Today Ad Meter (which uses a panel of 250 adult volunteers) had the Mars’ Snickers with Betty White at the top (we embedded that ad below).  Here at “Teach the 4 Ps”  used the Media Curves widget (see post below) — it’s online voters ranked the Budweiser Bull #1.   All these sites include links to all the ads.  Among pundits, you might enjoy reading reviews of the ads from Seth Stevenson at Slate.com, Stuart Elliott at the New York Times, or Bob Garfield over at Advertising Age (subscription may be required for this last one).

By the way, I would love to hear how you use these ads in class.  I usually show a couple of the AdMeter’s top rated ads and one of the lower ads.  I explain the research methodology used by USA Today.  Then I ask students why the top ones are “better.”  Eventually, I ask how we should judge these ads — and use it to bring us back to Promotion objectives.  If the objective is “likeable among a large cross-section of Americans” then these ads score well — but maybe the goals are to drive purchase, build awareness, or inform a particular target market.  This points out that these “popularity contests” may not be the best metric for judging the success of these commercials.