teachthe4ps.com - teaching the 4 ps

“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.

Have you been following Zappos over the last few years?  Well we have.  The online retailer (not just selling shoes anymore) is known for its “Wow” customer service and quirky culture (see “Zappos knows how to kick it,” Fortune, January 22, 2010).  They have recently come out with a new television advertising campaign (see below) and they are moving into video sharing.  Looking for more?  Link through to read more about Zappos and its founder, CEO and “2009 SUCCESS Achiever of the Year,” (Success Magazine, March 2, 2010)  Tony Hsieh.

I like to talk about Zappo’s when I get into retailing.  I like to show students how one or two retailers have developed marketing strategies that work — and walk through the target market and four Ps.  I start by confessing to my students that fifteen years ago I told students that shoes would probably never be sold over the Internet because of the need to try them on (what did I know?).

You can walk through the marketing strategy — starting with big efforts at customer retention — so a major target is current customers.  Especially with shoe buyers, customer retention is key — since their returns will be much lower than new customers.  They keep customers with phenomenal customer service.  Prices are reasonable.  For Promotion, the great customer service generates word of mouth.  Promotion also utilizes advertising (see example below — that probably targets new targets and customer acquisition) and now I can add a discussion of online video.  Place befits a quick tour of the Zappos website – where you can demonstrate more Promotion with the customer reviews of several products.  you can also talk about free shipping and returns when you are talking about Place policies.  And Product is interesting as the firm has a very wide selection and now sells a lot more than shoes.

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.

Users of our text books know that we have a great chapter opening case scenario for chapter 2 that describes Cirque du Soleil.  I was doing some research on Cirque today and found some great videos.  There is a short (0:41) video at the Cirque du Soleil website.  And at YouTube I found several longer (4-8 minute) videos.  I liked this one the best.  If you use our books, I suggest showing the short video (or an excerpt from this longer video) to introduce Cirque du Soleil and describe its marketing strategy planning process.

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.

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.

…and I was not impressed. But somehow, it shot up to #1 (with more than 1.6 million views last week) on Visible Measures Top 10 Viral Video chart — knocking the Evian roller skating babies out. What do you think?

Looking for something fun to show to class.  Everybody has their favorite Super Bowl ads – here is one “Top 10″ list at MSNBC, “Ah, the good-old days: The best Super Bowl ads,” (February 2, 2010).  While the MSNBC article shows each ad in a small screen, you can search on YouTube for most (if not all) of these ads for a larger format for class.  Many of our students may not have even seen these oldies but goodies.  My favorite from this list is the classic Larry Bird and Michael Jordan from 1993, “The Showdown” which I embedded below.