Skin care brand Sunday Riley wrote fake Sephora reviews…

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We have all worried about it. I love reviews for helping me make buying decisions. It is great to have information from real customers who have experience with a product. But are those reviews real? We have written about it before right here in Teach the 4 Ps. We also have an Ethical Dilemma on fake reviews in Essentials of Marketing.

It came up again recently when it was reported that “Skin care brand Sunday Riley wrote fake Sephora reviews for almost two years, FTC says.” (CNN, October 23, 2019. As consumers increasingly rely on reviews as a source of buying information, there is a growing incentive for sellers to add more information. This story about Sunday Riley is particularly egregious.

This is a major concern for retailers or other intermediaries that add value by providing reviews. For Amazon, good and bad reviews provide valuable information to consumers — but fake reviews threaten trust in the system. Consider, a study by a British consumer education group which found “Many popular tech products on Amazon are boosted by fake reviews, an investigation finds,” (CNN, April 16, 2019). Even travel site like TripAdvisor faces the same concerns, “TripAdvisor defends itself against claim that up to one in seven reviews might be fake,” (CNN, September 6, 2019). For Amazon and TripAdvisor their business models rely heavily on reviews. These intermediaries do not pay customers to provide this information — so it is low-cost to add — but it is one of the main reasons many customers use the sites. Consequently, Amazon and TripAdvisor use artificial intelligence technology to try to weed out fake reviews.

We cover online reviews and related ethical and legal issues in Chapters 13 and 16 in Essentials of Marketing. 

Mattress firms creating value (?) with financing deals…

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The mattress industry is a pretty crazy (check out “The Great Mattress Conspiracy: Why Are There So Many Mattress Stores?” on Endless Thread, podcast and story). You might check out the podcast for a fun example when you cover retailing. Or ethics. You might also check out one of our previous posts, “The Gray World of Online Reviews” (Teach the 4 Ps) — tags include ethics and online reviews.

Onto our story of the day and we are back in the retail mattress industry. With the emergence of new mattress products designed for easy shipping, online mattress stores (Casper, Leesa, Tuft & Needle), this market continues to be very competitive. Retail brick-and-mortar store Mattress Firm has closed 700 stores and is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Now they are competing on financing. In fact, Mattress Firm will give you six years of 0% interest on a mattress purchase of up to $3999. Financing is certainly one way to create value for customers — and the automobile industry has done it for years — but does it make sense for buyers of mattresses. We will see. Learn more reading “6-year, 0% loan for a mattress? Intense competition continues to grip mattress industry,” USA Today, October 25, 2019.

Ford manages its product line…

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In the next edition of Essentials of Marketing (publishing in early 2020), we created a neat new photo exhibit that clearly distinguishes between the terms individual product (“a particular product within a product line”), product line (“a set of products that are closely related”) and  product assortment (“the set of all product lines and individual products a firm sells). We used Coca-Cola as the example. A thumbnail of that image is shown in this post.

While we are on the topic though, I saw an interesting article in my USA Today this morning. Over the last year, Ford Motor Company has been dropping some individual products and trimming product lines as it tries to rationalize its product assortment. Did I really just write that sentence? You know what I mean. And you will know more after you read “Ford kills the Flex,” (October 28, 2019). You may find this gives some interesting examples to share with the class when you cover Product.

Delivering convenience and high quality meat from a vending machine

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Students don’t often think about how Place and choice of distribution channel can differentiate a product or deliver value (often through convenience). And not too many of us think about vending machines as a channel of distribution for much more than snacks and soft drinks. That is why this example, where the Applestone Meat Co. offers self-serve vending machines stocked with vacuum-sealed packages of meat, including everything you might expect to buy at a high-end butcher shop: Porterhouse steaks, rack of lamb, sausages, and ground beef. You can read more, and perhaps clip an image to drop into your slides when you cover Place in Chapters, 10, 11 and 12.

As an aside, if you, like me, didn’t get the “Horn & Hardart” reference in the article’s title, check out this Wikipedia entry and learn a little history.

#M4BW LEGO responds to millennial parents wanting sustainable toys

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A recent report from the Toy Association (you have to buy the report, but a short summary can be found here) suggests that millennial parents take values into account when buying toys for their children. For example a quote from the report indicates “Parents want to know that the products they buy will not harm the environment. Offering a toy that is biodegradable or an initiative that encourages toy sharing will appeal to today’s environmentally-conscious consumers.”

While there has always been a niche for sustainable toys (see for example a local-to-me company BeginAgain), the market is growing and now the world’s largest toy company is jumping in. Read more about LEGO’s new kit with pieces made from plant-based materials and how LEGO plans to have its products be entirely sustainable ty 2030 in “As millennial parents demand sustainable toys, Lego is perfecting plant-based bricks,” NBCNews.com, August 2, 2019).

An instructor might add this nugget of knowledge to students when discussing segmentation and targeting (Chapter 4). We open that chapter with a LEGO case, but this is so new, we don’t include the millennial parent segment in our discussion. It might also fit when you discuss Product (Chapter 8) and want a marketing for a better world spin on the topic.