Fall Semester Arrives and Teach the 4 Ps Returns…

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Just like many of you (I hope), Teach the 4 Ps took some time away from teaching this summer. In fact, I (Joe) was able to travel and see family and friends that I had not seen in at least a couple of years. I hope that you were able to do the same. Like many of you, my last few weeks have been consumed with getting ready for fall classes. Our classes here at Colorado State University start tomorrow. I am the author of an introductory marketing textbook – Essentials of Marketing.

Now that the semester is about to start, I will start making regular posts. This site is designed to support marketing instructors looking for current and interesting marketing examples and activities they can add to their course. The coverage is pretty general, so any marketing instructor can find something of interest here. The “Categories” have general marketing topics and also use “Chapter” numbers keyed to Essentials of Marketing. If you click on the Category chapter number or topic area, you will see a bunch of posts over the years that connect with the topic or chapter. Starting today, I will be posting once or twice a week.

If you have any ideas for posts, please send them to Joe[dot]Cannon[at]colostate.edu.

 

Breakfast Cereal Package Helps with Early Identification of Color Blindness

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Simple story and example of Marketing for a Better World. Sometimes clever marketing aligns a brand while making for a better world. “While people can live perfectly normal lives with color blindness, it helps to be aware of the condition. That goes double for children, who can be put in a disadvantage at school, where color is frequently used to convey information.” (Trendwatching). This Trendwatching story showed me how Kellogg’s made some changes to its Froot Loops box, turning it into a color blindness test. Of course, an image of the cereal looks pretty similar to the traditional Ishihara test for color blindness (if you cannot see the 15 inside the circle, you might be color blind).

These images might be a nice image addition to your slide deck for Chapter 8 (packaging).

Buy Now Pay Later Gets Easier!

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Credit cards have long been an easy way for consumer to “buy now pay later.” But not everyone could qualify for a credit card and the interest rates are very high!

These days consumers are seeing an explosion of point-of-sale “buy now pay later” (BNPL) options with companies like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm. This article at Forbes shows BNPL is expected to grow from ~$24 billion in 2020 to almost $100 billion in 2021. While BNPL can be particularly appealing to young shoppers, who may have more limited access to credit, and it is most popular with Gen Z and Millennials, Gen X and Boomers are now using it as well.

BNPL’s biggest appeal may be convenience. At the point of online purchase, consumers have the option to split that $100 pair of shoes into four $25 payments. And BNPLs don’t charge interest. The risk is borne by the BNPL provider, with the seller typically giving the BNPL service a cut (say 3%) of each sale. That nudge may close some sales and helps retailers. And it looks good to consumers who do not have to pay a premium to buy now pay later.

The growth of BNPL raises all kinds of interesting questions you might want to discuss in your marketing class. There are ethical questions about whether credit is a good idea (see this article in The Atlantic for warnings from personal financial experts).

Shopping During COVID-19 Accelerates Changes in Retail

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The brick-and-mortar retail business has struggled through the pandemic. With many retailers closed or shoppers simply avoiding them, online retailers benefitted. That has also created challenges for consumer goods makers that relied on those brick-and-mortar retailers to sell their wares. This Fast Company article, “How COVID-19 accelerated a shopping revolution” describes how fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff responded and offset the loss of sales in its retail channels.

Another Fast Company article describes how omnichannel, “a multichannel selling approach in which a retailer provides a seamless customer shopping experience from computer, mobile service, or brick-and-mortar store” (definition from our textbook, Essentials of Marketing) grew in importance during the pandemic. The pandemic increased the importance of curbside pickup and online distribution. In “Can retailers meet the demands of the omnichannel revolution?” you can read examples of how some retailers adapted.

It isn’t only Google and Facebook that tracks customers for advertising purposes…

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Online music streaming service Spotify believes that it can someday become one of the advertising powerhouses. But like its rivals in the advertising business, Google and Facebook, the company needs to collect and analyze lots of data on its customers. Spotify knows more than just what its customers are listening to, it also knows what they are doing and what you are going through.

The Spotify app can gather data from customers’ phones’ including accelerometer, gyroscope, and location data. This might be analyzed to find out if and when a customer works out or walks their dog.

And “Spotify (also) knows that you started playing Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” at 23:03, listened to it for one minute, then searched for “break up” and listened to the entire four hours and 52 minutes of the “ANGRY BREAKUP PLAYLIST” without any pauses. Spotify might know to serve this listener ads about ice cream or (maybe a few weeks later) ads for online dating services.

Right now, Spotify is investing a lot in data science to figure out what all that data it collects can be used for. Privacy? Read more in “All the Ways Spotify Tracks You – and How to Stop It,” Wired.

Behind Costco’s Treasure-Hunt Shopping Strategy

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This Wall Street Journal video “Behind Costco’s Treasure-Hunt Shopping Strategy,” describes Costco’s marketing strategy. (see also this article at Business Insider).  Surprisingly, the store makes it hard to shop there – for example, it changes the location of some products and have limited selection. You might question whether this is customer oriented. But it seems to address other customer needs – including the joy of shopping and the fun of finding bargains.

This video might be fun to show when covering consumer behavior (Chapter 5) or retailing (Chapter 12). It might also be shown after the video, “A Brief History of Retail.”