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).

A Couple of Examples of Companies Trying to Get Green (#M4BW)

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Many companies are seeking ways to lower their carbon footprint. Some, just because they want to do the right thing. Others because they want to build a better reputation with millennials. Some for both reasons. Here are a couple of short articles from Fast Company, that provide some good examples you might use in your class.

The title of the first one gives the top level overview, “Coke’s newest bottle is made from paper“. Consumer throw away millions of plastic Coke bottles every year. Is this a practical and environmentally friendly solution?

As you probably know, eating a more plant based diet might not be healthier just for you — but also for the planet. So a company like Sweetgreen (a restaurant chain focused on salads) is already ahead of the game. It is leaning into that with other efforts to lower its emissions. Read more in “How Sweetgreen plans to cut its carbon footprint in half in the next 6 years.”

 

World Changing Ideas – New Product Development at Its Finest (#M4BW)

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I always enjoy Fast Company‘s innovation issues. This year’s “World Changing Idea Awards honor the businesses and organizations driving change in the world.” There is always an emphasis on new products and services that make the world a better place — a natural connection to our Marketing for a Better World (#M4BW) theme in the most recent edition of Essentials of Marketing. Winners included:

  • Abbott Labs which made a tiny implant that keeps babies’ hearts healthy (see video below)
  • Carbon Lighthouse which uses AI which adjusts businesses energy consumption by up to 30%.
  • Invest Your Values (I love when the brand name tells you what the product is) is a digital tool that helps employees invest their retirement money in companies that share their values.

These examples can be used across a number of chapters — but may relate most closely to Chapter 8 (goods and services) and Chapter 9 (new product development). The video below (first 2:20) features a few of these companies and might be shown in class.

 

Critical Thinking for Students – What businesses are harmed (helped) by the pandemic?

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OK, life gives you lemons (or worse, far worse, a pandemic), how do you make lemonade. Because the pandemic is everywhere these days, we might use this current event to get students to think about the impact on various types of business. You might ask your students questions like…

  • What types of products (or companies) are likely to do particularly well (or poorly) in the pandemic? And more importantly why?

Many of their answers can be tied back to consumer behavior changing. This gives them the opportunity to see how understanding customers influences business. For more interesting examples you might share with your students, consider these articles: “Puzzles, hair dye, yeast: Companies thriving during COVID-19,” and “Early department stores were incredibly innovative. What happened?” to find less obvious examples.

  • How should companies engage in promotion during the pandemic? Why? 

Again, more examples from successful and less successful companies. See these articles about advertising “We have hit peak pandemic advertising, and now they’re just annoying,” and “Brands With Strong Twitter Personalities Stay the Course During Covid-19” (you may need to sign up to access that last one — you can get three free articles a month after signing up).

Time for Fun – Emoji Brand Quiz

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Brilliant Ads put together a fun “Emoji Brand Quiz“. They have 60 brands in emojis (examples and brands included below). See also this one (with different emoji/brand combinations) at Buzzfeed. This could be a lot of fun to show in class. I might create a little contest to kick off class in the fall. It might also work well when you cover brand names.