I saw this cartoon and it reminded me of many meetings I was in while working in various marketing roles. As marketers we often have an abundance of information to consider and goals to achieve. Figuring out where to start and how to create a cohesive strategy is a challenge many businesses, large and small, struggle with. In Essentials of Marketing we provide a framework and process for creating a marketing strategy. It all starts with bringing in information from your customers, company, competitors, and external market environment (context). From there the process organizes and filters that information, applies segmentation and positioning approaches, and at that point creating your marketing mix becomes much more straightforward. A diagram of the process is shown below and more information can be found in our book. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the process and then each subsequent chapter dives into detail on one of the components.
Archives for 2017
Five Psychological Principles To Guide Your Holiday Marketing Campaign
Many retailers and producers depend heavily on holiday shopping to hit their annual goals. The challenge is often trying to differentiate your wares and offerings from the multitude of other vendors trying to do the same thing. This Forbes article, Five Psychological Principles to Guide Your Holiday Marketing Campaign, discusses psychological influences and how marketers can tailor their marketing campaigns to capitalize on consumer buying behavior. The five principles they discuss are:
- Urgency and scarcity
- Social proof
- The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
- Paradox of choice and compound value
- Anchoring and Decoy pricing
Many of these concepts are discussed in Essentials of Marketing in Chapter 5, Final Consumers and Their Buying Behavior. Ask your students to provide examples of producers/retailers that have utilized some of these techniques recently!
UPS Adds Holiday Delivery Surcharge
According to this NPR article, UPS is going to add a surcharge to packages delivered around Black Friday and Christmas. UPS says they’re implementing the surcharge to offset their increased costs from hiring temporary personnel and adding delivery vehicles to cover demand which jumps by roughly 50% during this period. The surcharge will run between Nov. 19 and Dec. 2 and then again from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23.
This change can spark a good discussion about how interconnected the links in the channel of distribution are. What are some of the potential repercussions of this surcharge? From a competitive standpoint, is it more likely for FedEx to copy this practice or will they hold price to gain a competitive advantage over UPS? What’s the impact to retailers? Will they pass these increases on to customers or absorb them? If they pass them on, how will they do so? It may not be as simple as increasing shipping costs as consumers are often turned off by high shipping fees and may decide to shop elsewhere if they feel shipping costs are unreasonable. Push the students to think of creative options. For instance, what if stores hold shipping prices constant but avoid the surcharge by delaying shipments until after the surcharge ends on Dec. 2? If packages took longer to arrive than expected but still got to the customer well in advance of Christmas would that be acceptable? Students may be surprised to realize how a change by one company can have a multitude of impacts on others.
Marketing Head-Scratchers
Have you ever seen an advertisement that caused you to scratch your head and ask “What were they thinking?” There’s no shortage of examples of culturally insensitive or politically incorrect ads but sometimes I see things and just can’t figure out how a company decided this was the best way to promote their product. A student recently shared an example with me when she was stumped. Here’s the ad that was pushed to her phone:
This cosmetics ad for a firming treatment features Sega’s popular video game icon Sonic the Hedgehog. Capitalizing on video game popularity isn’t new but what is surprising is the product it was attached to. Firming cosmetics are anti-aging cosmetics and it seems to me that there would be a pretty small intersection of customers who identify with Sonic the Hedgehog and customers who are interested anti-aging products. Maybe I’m wrong but it led to a good classroom discussion. If you have an idea of why Glamglow thought this was a good idea, please post a comment and share!
Trademark Disputes
Trademarks can be tricky. When companies spend millions to build and maintain a brand they want to make sure that brand is protected. One way to get that protection is to file for a trademark. However, the extent of that protection and even whether the trademark will be granted can be complicated. Can I trademark a common word like “banana”? Possibly. Realize that “Apple” is trademarked. How different do trademarks need to be to be protected? That’s the subject of this GameZone article, “Activision fighting dog poop cleaning service named ‘Call of DooDee’“. Activision, publisher of the popular video game “Call of Duty”, sees this dog poop cleaning service as a threat to their trademark.
Should the trademark, “Call of DooDee” be granted or denied? It’s certainly not identical but is close enough to create a potential associate and thereby degrade Activision’s trademark. When filing for a trademark you must also specify the markets you want the trademark to be protected in. That could play a role in how a dispute like this could be resolved. In this particular case it looks as if the trademark request may be abandoned but it does illustrate the importance of filing trademarks as well as the importance of doing a search before trying to build your own brand.
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