teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

I think this speaks for itself.  Clever.  Not sure if my students would agree — or get it — but I did post it at Learn the 4 Ps.

This is a great case study for a creative, clever, and contemporary campaign put together by the Droga5 advertising agency for Bing.  The 3 minute video tells a great story that will work well in a class on integrated marketing communications.  The case study includes details on the results — which are nice for students to see.  Of course most of your students are in the target market for the campaign and will be familiar with hip-hop artist Jay-Z. We also posted this at Learn the 4 Ps.

Marketers have always been excited about the idea of turning consumers into powerful Promotion tools for their brands — but fostering word-of-mouth isn’t easy.  Now Facebook is hoping they have a strategy that makes it easy for consumers and marketers to work together to promote brands and products we “like” (as in pressing the “Like” button on Facebook).

No one is quite sure where this is going, but many consumers are already clicking the Facebook “Like” button on their favorite brands — or maybe mentioning in a post a recent  purchase of the brand.  Now it seems that Facebook will mention this ads targeting that customer’s friends.  So for example, if I “Like” a brand like Ikea on my Facebook page, an ad could appear on my friends pages that mentions “Joe (and perhaps more of their friends) Likes Ikea.”  In theory, knowing that Joe likes Ikea may make the store more appealing to my friends. This short article at Fast Company suggest that Facebook’s sponsored stories work – see “Facebook Sponsored Stories Performing 2 Times Better Than Standard Ads” (July 15, 2011).

Why could it work?  Because Facebook users are trusting people.  There is evidence that social networks foster trust.  You can read more about it in another Fast Company article, “Digital Oxytocin:  How Trust Keeps Facebook, Twitter Humming” (July 18, 2011).

These short articles epitomize one of the original motivations for Teach the 4 Ps – how can we keep our customers up-to-date when books only publish every few years.  So many new things are happening in marketing — so the blog is designed, in part, to help you stay current.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

P&G has long been a trend-setter and leader in consumer packaged goods marketing.  They were one of the first to increase point-of-purchase (in-store) advertising and have made many bold moves on the social media front.  We have highlighted some of these in previous posts on Teach the 4 Ps (see Sit or Squat phone app and the Old Spice “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” viral video campaign).  The video below is a segment from an interview with P&G CEO Bob McDonald which includes a look at where P&G sees marketing going in the future. In the process, McDonald reveals that Old Spice is now the #1 body wash and deodorant following the “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign.

My students love Nike — when I survey them about their favorite brands it consistently ranks #1.  My point – Nike examples play well in class.  Of course any example should be relevant to marketing and this one could work well with a discussion of segmentation, new product development or advertising.

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.

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.

Social media is getting less confusing.  Best practices are emerging.  Marketing managers are better understanding how which marketing objectives might be best addressed with social media.  This article, “Are You Talking to Me?” (Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2011, non-subscribers click here) suggests five best practices used by companies with some success in social media.  Many of the lessons come from “listening” closely to customers via social media.  The early heavy users of social media are listening, learning, and adapting.  Anyway, the article has some good examples of using Facebook and Twitter that you can bring to a class discussion about Promotion, social media, and market research.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Good marketers understand the path to purchase — and tie different marketing strategy elements to help customers move down that path.  This article at ClickZ, “Social Media Uses Content Marketing to Shop,” (March 21, 2011) shows how different types of online content help a consumer move along in the purchase process. The article is short, but informative and includes good examples.  This might provide you with some good examples to use in consumer behavior or in the Promotion chapters to discuss how website content can relate to promotion objectives.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Now Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a big name author in the tech community — I think this is his tenth book.  He already has an incredible network.  With the publication of his new book – Enchantment:  The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, Kawasaki relied on low-cost forms of social media to get the word out and drive great initial sales. Read about it at Mashable “HOW TO:  Launch Any Product Using Social Media,” (March 31, 2011)

The book is already on the bestseller lists at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.  In other words, it worked.  This is a great case study on how to use social media.  While the case study looks at the launch of a book by an already successful author, I think that with some in-class discussion, you can see how the ideas can be applied to other product launches.  It might make for an interesting exercise to ask students how these ideas could be adapted to launch a new dog food, hip hop band, or snow board.

This example could be used when talking about marketing strategy planning, promotion, publicity, or social media.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

It is always nice to find articles about marketing research.  This article, “Sentiment Analysis Gives Companies Insight Into Consumer Opinion” (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 1, 2011) is an example of a trend in marketing research — real-time analysis of social media data.  Kia, Best Buy, and Viacom are among a handful of firms using…

…a tool that can swiftly analyze large numbers of opinions on the Web, including blogs, the microblogging site Twitter, and social networking service Facebook. It’s called Mass Opinion Business Intelligence and it was developed by an Irvine (Calif.)-based company called WiseWindow. It coughs up a continuous, real-time feed of relevant consumer sentiment, gathered from millions of sites.

The article cites a number of different examples that might be useful in class.  An accompanying slide show of “Most Loved — And Hated — Tech Companies” shows a real example that maps 10 tech companies on a 2×2 matrix — see below.  Check out the slide show and article for a full explanation.