teachthe4ps.com - teaching the 4 ps

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 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.

Many of us are familiar with the old “Man in the Chair” ad (if not, link to the blog post first).  It does a nice job of demonstrating integrated marketing communications and how in business markets, advertising works in combination with personal selling.  I saw this post at Mac Macintosh’s Sales Lead Insights blog that brought this point back home to me (click on the ad in the blog to see if full size).   One of the comments on the blog post pointed me to this great presentation (see below) by Ralph Oliva at a Business Marketing Association event.  It is a bit long (5:41), but might make a nice video to show when discussing organizational buying — or for an example of IMC in the B2B context.  It updates the “Man in the Chair” ad — but also shows how the core marketing concepts have not changed.  To fully appreciate this, I suggest you check out the blog post first and click on the ad to see if full size.  Then watch the video below.

As marketers move to social media, they are trying to figure out how to measure the success of such campaigns.  An Adweek article posted this morning notes that advertisers may soon have a new way to measure the amount of online buzz (see “New Campaign Metric:  Social Chatter,” January 27, 2010).

But, “Does Chattter Matter?”  An article in the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, “Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales“  (by Vasant Dhar and Elaine A. Chang, pp. 300-307) shows some evidence that in the music industry online chatter matters and predicts future sales.  We could use more academic research to show what types of products benefit from online chatter.

One of the objectives of this blog is to bridge the gap between editions of our text books. Some of the social media platforms being used today were not widely known just a couple of years ago. And marketing managers are still trying to figure out how to use social media like Facebook and Twitter. So this blog provides some examples you can bring into the classroom. Ford has done a nice job, and Grant McCracken describes their success with last year’s launch of the Fiesta Movement campaign in “How Ford Got Social Marketing Right,” BusinessWeek, January 8, 2010.

Hello and welcome to “Teach the 4 Ps” a blog for marketing instructors and people interested in reading about marketing.  The blog came about after Bill Perreault and I (Joe Cannon) developed a newsletter (Teach the 4Ps) for instructors using our text books – Essentials of Marketing and Basic Marketing.  The newsletter is designed to give instructors current articles, websites, viral videos, and online advertisements – with comments suggesting how they could be used in teaching the introductory marketing course.  We all know our students like current examples, so Bill and I want to provide more for users of our books.  We received many positive comments on the newsletter – so we decided to share our ideas with anyone teaching marketing or interested in marketing.  We hope you will share back – and give us comments and ideas on the blog.

For several reasons, this resource is even more valuable in a blog:

• It makes the newsletter interactive – we hope you will offer comments on our posts.
• We post almost every day – making everything that much more current.
• The blog format makes it easy to find J.I.T. (just in time) examples for your classes.  For example, say are you teaching pricing this week – click on “Price” in categories to the right and you will have a listing of only those blog posts that have something to do with price.

So, please take a look around.  We are kicking this off with more than 80 posts already up.  Let us know what you think?  Do you have ideas about how we might make this resource even more valuable?  Click on the headline above and add your comments (or read those of others).

We are amazed at how little concern our students (and my kids) have about their privacy.  Are our students aware of what they sacrifice and the potential future problems they may encounter with this carefree attitude?  You might find it helpful to assign or discuss “Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook,” in Wired, January 5, 2010.

Thank you Stephen Baker.  Bill and I are working hard on develop new frameworks and conceptual organizers for our books so that we can help students better understand social media.  The current editions of Basic Marketing and Essentials of Marketing do not include references to Twitter (which was not around when we last revised) and only a few referemces to Facebook and other social media.  Our books deal extensively with the Internet and its implications, but social media is the next wave.  While Baker’s article “Beware Social Media Snake Oil” (BusinessWeek, December 3, 2009) doesn’t bring clarity to these issues, it calls attention to the hype.  We are trying to carefully revise our books to reflect an understanding about how social media can be effectively used as part of an organization’s integrated marketing communications plan.

As a quick aside, we will miss Stephen Baker’s insightful articles at BusinessWeek.  When Bloomberg bought BusinessWeek, Stephen Baker was not offered a job.  If you are interested, you can follow his blog at thenumerati.net.

Augie Ray provides a very thought-provoking post over at the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals titled, “2010:  The Year Marketing Dies…”  He does add the subtitle, “Or at Least Marketing as We Know It!”  The post might have been better titled “The Year Advertising Dies” because it really primarily addresses the rapidly changing world of media.  He eventually gets to this point — the title was mostly to be provocative.  As consumers learn about products from a wide variety of sources outside the direct control of marketing managers — what does this mean for those of us teaching marketing?

I think that much of what we do stays the same.  Many of our core concepts don’t change.  If organizations make products that satisfy customers, price them so that customers see value in the purchase and make the available where customers want them, then there will be good word-of-mouth and brands will benefit from the buzz.  Marketing managers will have to dig in deeper to better understand, customers, competitors, and their own company’s resources.  They will have to segment markets better, position and differentiate their offerings — and will have to produce marketing mixes that appeal to target customers.  Tomorrow’s (our students) marketers will need to understand these different media and work with them.

What do you think of Augie Ray’s post?  What will it mean for those of us teaching marketing?