The article might have broad interest in an introductory marketing class — as many of your finance and accounting majors might be considering post-college work as financial advisers or in insurance sales  The article might stimulate discussion about how financial services firms might better adapt marketing mixes to better meet the needs of this target market.  A prime area for discussion could be the sales force — it might be interesting to ask how sales training should be adapted to address this market.  Students might also be encouraged to think about how to adapt a website, advertising, and products.  This article with some of these questions has been posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

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.

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.

This case study is one of the best examples of digital advertising I have read lately.  A nice example of using analytics to identify a target market and a great use of mobile advertising.

The article provides some good examples for market segmentation (boys v. girls, differences in play across international markets), market research (researchers “embedded” with families to observe how Lego kids live and play), and product strategy (product design to appeal to girls).  The result is the Lego Friends line of toys.  Lego has put $40 million behind its global marketing effort.  Still it might be a while before we know if this will work.  Lego decided to wait until after the holidays to launch the new line.  Given the importance of Christmas to toy sales, it might be a year or two before we know if Lego has finally cracked the code for the other 50% of the toy market.

You can read more about Harley’s efforts in this Wall Street Journal article, “Harley, With Macho Intact, Tries to Court More Women” (October 31, 2011, non-subscribers may need to click here).  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

The debate could be extended into your classrooms when you cover ethics, legal, or corporate social responsibility — which comes in the first and last chapters of our books.  It could also be discussed in the segmentation chapters (we have an Ethics Exercise on a topic relevant to this in our segmentation chapter) or in ethics when covering promotion or product.

This example will work well when you cover demographic trends, market segmentation, cross-cultural, or product — since most of the examples in the article have to do with adapting product to this market.