I enjoy bringing social marketing examples to my classes. Here is a useful definition for social marketing that I like: applying marketing concepts to “bring about social change or achieve behavioral goals for a social good” (Fiehn, 2009)
Examples of social marketing educate students by showing them marketing concepts in a different context. For marketing skeptics in your class, it demonstrates marketing in a positive light. This example deals with drinking and driving — something relevant to many of our students. The 1:44 video was developed by Oglivy Brazil.
Air New Zealand’s creative agency, .99, put together a funny pre-flight video that took off as a viral video. Within a few hours of posting the video it was the ninth most tweeted about video on Twitter. It features Richard Simmons — many of our students may wonder who this guy is — so maybe it won’t work in class without a bit of a history lesson (click here for Simmons’ Wikipedia entry to learn or refresh your memory about the fitness guru.). It could be fun to show in class.
I wondered if the quirky humor fits Air New Zealand’s personality. I didn’t know much about the airline’s positioning, but one of the “Guiding Principles” at its website indicates: “Our workplace will be fun, energising, and where everyone can make a difference.” Their This suggests that the video may fit and reinforce their positioning. Then I read about the airline’s risque and fun “Nothing to Hide” advertising campaign — featuring real employees in body painted uniforms. Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.
Few people will buy a new car unless they have a test drive. So obviously an important marketing objective for an auto retailer is to get customers inside their cars for a drive. Let’ say you have a newly designed vehicle — but most of the new design went on the inside and not on the outside.
Such was the case for the Nissan Patrol — a large SUV model sold in the middle east. When potential customers see the Patrol driving down the road, attention and interest are not peaked. There is no “Wow, that SUV looks sharp, I am going to have to check it out.” That was the problem facing Arabian Automobiles – the exclusive Nissan distributor in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Arabian liked what Nissan had done with the Patrol — there were a lot of upgrades on the inside. So how can they get people to get into and test drive the new SUV? Who do you target?
Check out the clever campaign. It might be fun to put together a slide that outlines the basic issues facing Arabian Motors. You could ask students how the path to purchase worked – making sure they realized the importance of the test drive. Then talk about the new Nissan Patrol — a Google image search will quickly find you a photo to add to your slides. Ask students how you move customers along the path to purchase. Then show the video. Great to use with consumer behavior or promotion.
“I wanna make a film all about product placement, marketing, and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing, and advertising.”
This new film “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” is a documentary by Morgan Spurlock. This is the same guy who took down McDonald’s in Super Size Me. The movie opens April 22 — and I don’t think I will wait for the DVD before seeing this one. This film is about our business — so we should probably try to get on top of it. To help you with that, there is an article that gives you some background over at Fast Company – see “Morgan Spurlock: I’m With the Brand” (March 24, 2011). Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.
Let’s get up to speed on Groupon. I definitely missed this one. I thought the Groupon thing was just kind of a niche idea; I thought it would never take off and hoped it wouldn’t. We don’t need to make consumers more price sensitive – do we? I also thought they were nuts last year for turning down a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.
What is Groupon? Groupon is the most well-known of a variety of different “Deal-of-the-day” websites. Groupon is now in more than 250 geographic markets around the world – with most promotions for small local firms. Customers sign up to receive a daily e-mail with a deal like “Get $20 worth of pizza from Giovanni’s Pizza for only $10.” If you want to buy the discount – you have to buy that day. The retailer and Groupon typically split the $10 – about in half though that varies. So a retailer receives $5 for a coupon that gives a customer $20 worth of pizza. This raises a variety of interesting questions – good in-class discussions – about when this might make sense.
Well Groupon appears to be here stay—so I have a few different articles to get you up to speed. From a teaching perspective there are two issues. First, there are real questions about whether using Groupon makes sense for small businesses (the subject of the first three articles above). It might make sense for a company trying to attract new customers – and confident it can retain them. For different perspectives on this issue, see: “Is Groupon a Good Deal for Small Business?,” (Fox Business, January 27, 2011). And do we want to attract the deal-prone consumer — will they be loyal and profitable? For one perspective on this issue see “Beware of Innovations from Daily-Deal Sites,” (Harvard Business Review, March 25, 2011).
On the other hand, it makes little sense to send out a deep discount coupon to your regular customers. The first two articles above all deal with that issue. Second, there are concerns with Groupon’s long-term marketing strategy. With few barriers to entry, new competitors are springing up all over. This has given small businesses buying power vis a vis Groupon and its competitors (see “Burned by Daily-Deal Craze, Small Businesses Get Savvy,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2011 – non-subscribers may have to click here or check out the video below). It also naturally leads to questions about Groupon’s strategy moving forward. With few barriers to entry, how can Groupon get a sustainable competitive advantage? Groupon is trying – check out “Are Four Words Worth $25 Billion for Groupon?” (Bloomberg Businessweek, March 17, 2011) to read about how Groupon is trying to move ahead with a new location based strategy.
As you can imagine, Groupon could be used to discuss consumer behavior, sales promotion, retailing, and marketing strategy planning.
One of our favorite companies here at T4Ps is Zappos. We also feature them in our text book. The online retailer is always innovating. Now they are using their own employees in online videos — they have produced 58,000 short videos of employees (not professional models) showing off its shoes and other apparel. The use of employees can build trust — and seeing someone actually using a product can increase its appeal. Zappos also conducted an experiment – showing the same products with and without a video. They found sales averaged 10% higher when a video accompanied the item. Check out “A New Sales Model: Employees” (Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2011 – non-subscribers may have to click here).
This example would be helpful when talking about marketing research, retail, or promotion. Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.
Sometimes marketing managers are afraid to rule out segments of the market. But that is what targeting and positioning is all about — making decisions about which target market our offering will serve and which it will not. By designing a marketing mix that appeals more to one market segments, you will probably make it less appealing to others. That is almost always a good trade-off. Dr Pepper Ten makes it clear that this soft drink is for men — and a great example of targeting for our students. Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.
Are you familiar with TED? TED (an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Design) dedicates itself to promoting and disseminating “ideas worth spreading.” Click the TED logo to the left to connect to its website where you can learn more. TED has a number of different conferences around the world where it invites some of the world’s most interesting speakers — across a broad range of topics — to give the 18-minute (or less) talk of their lives. Many of these talks are posted at the TEDTalks website and later spread virally, where you may have seen one or more.
This past fall, TED moved on to our turf — advertising. It invited anyone to nominate “ads worth spreading” — with the idea that these ads deserved to be seen. TED wanted nominations in four categories: 1) social good, 2) infectiously compelling (viral), 3) industry impact (innovation), and 4) Talk – a format that follows the TEDTalks style. After reviewing more than 1000 ads, a panel of 24 judges picked 10 winners (here is the site, sorry I cannot link it up right now for some reason but just enter this address into your browser to see all the ads www.ted.com/initiatives/aws). We posted one of the winners, the Chase Film (for Intel’s new Core i5 Processor) about a month ago.
Perhaps the one I like best promotes an idea from the Nike Foundation “The Girl Effect – Clock is Ticking” I embedded this 3:05 video below. Sometimes I like to show advertising that promotes an idea or a cause.
OK, we don’t intend to turn this into a Coca Cola blog. But as I searched around for more information on the “Happiness Machine” (see previous post below), I came upon this great interview at Mashable, “How Coca-Cola Created Its “Happiness Machine” (July 21, 2010). Meaghan Edelstein interviewed Coke execs and creative folks at Definition 6 the ad agency behind the original “Happiness Machine” on campus at St. John’s University. The interview is great and filled with useful insights on how Coke and Definition 6: 1) came up with the idea, 2) executed on the idea, 3) put it all together, and 4) got the video to go viral. What a great classroom exercise — show the video and discuss it in class. Then give students this additional back story to show how creative ideas are brought to life.
