As a big fan of MMA and phrases that stuck into our minds making us remember products and services forever, like an efficient and free marketing tool, I would like to start my Post #10 like this:
“IT IS AAAALLLLLLL OOVER,” as Mike Goldberg would say.
Yes, this is true, my friends. This is the last post of my blog, which I consider one of the main projects I did during my academic career. Not only because of the visibility that this blog could give me for future job opportunities, but also because of the experience I got studying different marketing concepts and making critical analysis about different topics.
By analyzing the market as a whole, this blog allowed me, and hopefully the readers, to identify concepts used by companies to advertise their products, target and segment their markets.
Marketing strategies and every concept presented in this blog clearly represent the 4P’s in some way. The contact between companies and its customers is actually an exchange of favors: the money for the product. As the definition says, marketing is there to satisfy both sides’ needs, and for that to happen, it is necessary an efficient communication. Consumers will always be influenced by behavioral buying processes, psychological factors, and more, and companies need to be aware of any chance of opportunity that could attract their target market’s attention to their product.
The buying process starts at the moment that consumers identify some need and there are products in the market to satisfy it. It is interesting the fact that the market is like a circle. Companies need to sell their products in order to generate their profit. Companies pay their employees who will now be able to satisfy their needs exchanging money for products or services. These new companies will pay their workers, who are now consumers, and so on.
However, it is impossible the idea of a market where 100% companies are successful because there is competition. The competition harms the worse companies, which affects directly their employees, who can be fired and give up on satisfying some of their needs. The process of making a choice is painful, and the opportunity cost will always be present to make us analyze our decisions, which also affects the market. In other words, everything is connected .
Every knowledge got in this course has clear application on our daily activities. Even if we decide not to pursue the marketing field, we will always be consumers and customers, which means that it is also important to know exactly what is happening out there. We cannot forget that behind every product, there is going to be a marketing strategy making us decide for that option. There will always be marketers trying to get our attention.
Marketers are, in summary, those who have the job of attracting customers and consumers, and they will use every available strategy to make their products look like they are the right choice for us. We will always be at one of the sides: the consumer’s. However, we may also be at the seller’s side, and if we are, it is good to be prepared to use every technique efficiently.
Even if it was not the intention of this post, I would not be able to leave this blog without presenting this video. It represents exactly how much marketing and marketers are willing to adapt the information to make the product more attractive. As marketers, it is a great thing to know that we are able to manipulate what people think about our product or service. The consumers/customers, however, are simple believers who think that the world is as perfect as advertisings say it is.
This video shows that marketing can actually make you a fool by manipulating what you see. It does not matter how much you think this might be horrible to know that things are happening right in our sides and we do not see it. Marketing make us imagine a perfect world, and this might be cruel, but the message I want you to get from this video is simple:
This is marketing!
I hope you all enjoyed this experience as much as I did.
Hello, my friends. First of all, I would like to say that this post is TOTALLY connected with the previous post, so I recommend you to read it before if you have not done it.
Summarizing, I talked about a campaign called, in a free translation, “Is Pepsi ok?” that Pepsi created in Brazil. You can watch bellow, once again, two combined commercials (Do not forget to activate the subtitles).
In this campaign, Pepsi assumed the second place in the market in order to reach the customer differently; this time, as a very good and more affordable option. The campaign was very successful in a short-term, considering that Pepsi saw its brand awareness, sales and market share increase. However, this campaign can be a real bomb for the brand in a long-term. Let’s understand the reason for that.
Our brain is constantly making decisions based on our emotions. The brand always compares what is good and bad, and, consequently, if it is better or worse. At the moment that Pepsi assumes its second place in the market, the company itself is assuming a position on which they consider themselves worse than Coca Cola. This, therefore, values and strengthen Coca Cola as a brand.
Considering that this marketing is very mature and both companies already have their own places in the market, the products does not vary in order to differentiate themselves one from another, and the loyal customers are already well defined.
This means that if Pepsi wanted to attract customers, it would be necessary to appeal to lower prices. Besides this, assuming the second place in the market with this campaign, Pepsi states a situation where its prices would always have to be lower than Coca Cola’s.
The first impression of the campaign is that it is a real success. Its results can be explained by the fact that people were accepting more the idea of drinking Pepsi in places that Coca Cola was not offered, families were buying Pepsi because of its lower price and the good experience, and stores were choosing selling Pepsi instead of Coca Cola once that the profit would be higher.
However, being a substitute for Coca Cola, as Pepsi assumed to be, leads to the fact that Pepsi is considering that fact that people would not find Coca Cola, otherwise, people would not have to listen the phrase “We only have Pepsi. Is that ok?”
Except for places that have contracts with Pepsi, Coca Cola will always be present, and in a long term, when people forget this campaign, the only impression that will remain in people’s mind is that Coca Cola is better than Pepsi.
Besides that, if Coca Cola takes advantage of this situation guaranteeing its presence in different stores, and working its price in order to turn Pepsi’s price not cheaper enough, Pepsi will have its awareness reduced even more, and the end of the battle will be forever decreed.
People change their preferences as they grow up. New generations have different perspectives of the world. Marketing strategies change to adapt to people’s preference.
Before starting anything, I would like to present two Marketing concepts: Positioning and repositioning. Here are the definitions from the BusinessDicionary.com.
Positioning:A marketing strategy that aims to make a brand occupy a distinct position, relative to competing brands, in the mind of the customer.
Repositioning:Changing a brand’s status in comparison to that of the competing brands. Repositioning is effected usually through changing the marketing mix in response to changes in the market place, or due to a failure to reach the brand’s marketing objectives.
It is very common that a very successful company today may not be as successful in a decade. Some companies have customer’s loyalty, which is something very important not to lose market, but depending on the type of industry, being lucky and always competitive are keys to remain part of the main scenario.
There are companies that have to change the way people see the brand in order to recover from crisis, which has currently happened to McDonald’s. The constant loss in profit and market share turned the red light on to show that changes were necessary. The new generation seems not to be a big fan of the foods served in McDonald’s, its environment and several other factors. Therefore, transforming the brand seemed to be the only option to keep being “The Fast Food Champion”.
The BusinessDictionary.com also states that “Once a brand is positioned, it is very difficult to reposition it without destroying its credibility.” In McDonald’s example, this phrase seems to be true, considering McDonald’s did not have significant results and even had to change its CEO to try a different approach.
Pepsi, in its history, has been always fighting against Coca Cola to show which one is the best soft drink. A lot of money has been spent with several innovative commercials through the decades to show its supremacy.
After decades of intensive battle, Coca Cola seems to be the preferred soft drink around the world.
With this scenario, Pepsi adopted a different strategy in order to reach the consumer. In Brazil, Pepsi launched some years ago the campaign “Pode ser Pepsi?” (Is Pepsi Ok?). I will ask you to watch the video below in order to understand the meaning of the campaign (Do not forget to activate the subtitles).
In this campaign, Pepsi does something that, at least inside the United States, seems to be impossible: Pepsi assumes its second place in the market. This approach, however, was made in a very interesting way.
Combining funny commercials with promotional prices, Pepsi achieved the market as a substitute for Coca Cola, but considering itself an extremely good option for customers. The appealing price, therefore, made the customers take a risk on buying a Pepsi.
The strategy of the company was that those people would recognize the good experience of drinking a very good soft drink paying a more affordable price, which would make them think about buying a Pepsi again in another opportunity.
The campaign was so successful in Brazil, in which lasted for two years, that it was even exported to Spain as you can see below.
Considering the historical battle, this campaign will probably not be used inside the United States. However, it is interesting to see a company using different strategies for different markets. Instead of losing credibility, Pepsi reached the market efficiently, increased the brand awareness, sales increased significantly, and this campaign was considered The Campaign of the Year in 2012. A real success in a short-term.
Wait… in a short-term? What about the long-term? Is this campaign good for the brand?
Oh nooo… Gabriel is going to talk about another thousand Marketing strategies of how to organize a supermarket, offer the products, and make people spend more money!
WRONG!
As you know, the last post discussed about the supermarket owner’s side of attracting customers, but let’s think for a second… After selling its products to the supermarket, would the companies have any type of interference on how they are going to be offered? Yes, and I promise I will try to show it in a short post Haha.
Obviously, the first tool that companies have in their hands is the price, and price decisions will be directly related to the relation between supply and demand. Companies usually change the price considering that they will have the same effect for the final consumer. In other words, if the company raises the price, the supermarket will raise the price, or the opposite. However, when companies decrease the price, it is necessary to pay attention if the supermarkets will really pass the discount to the consumers, because this could be used to keep the price and generate more profit.
For companies that sell their products directly to the final consumer, like clothing stores, everything is a consequence of the customers’ reaction to the actual price. But this is different inside supermarkets considering that this is also a place where companies are daily dealing with direct competitors. Therefore, not only how much is being sold by the supermarket is important to define which price should be practiced by the companies, but also the prices that are being practiced by the competitors. Supermarkets can be considered a partial representation of a company’s market share, once it is possible to realize how its products have performed comparing to the others.
Another strategy used by companies to influence its products’ selling inside grocery stores is the presence in shelves. Companies are constantly fighting for shelf space, and companies actually pay the supermarkets in order to have a higher percentage of the shelves, or specific spaces filled with its products to guarantee that they will be correctly displayed to the customers.
You can find some interesting information in this link…
Companies also pay high prices to have personal gondolas. Not only they represent a special place to display the products, but also they are placed in strategic spaces of the store. These are usually places that are easily seen by the customers, or places that they would certainly have to go through in order to find common products.
To finish, one of the types of employees of supermarkets are the replenishers. As the name indicates, these are the people who are responsible for replenishing the products at the shelves as they are sold. I honestly do not know if it is a common practice in the United States, but in Brazil, these people are not always supermarkets’ employees.
Companies have their own replenishers allocated inside big supermarkets to guarantee that their products will not be out of stock or wrongly displayed. This is taken very seriously once the simple fact that if the first lines of the shelves of a products were already sold, the product would not appear to the customers right away, which could make them have their attention caught by other brands.
Considering that different companies would have their own replenishers, there is also a competition inside those places. These people work as guardians to make sure that the other company’s employee would not invade their space, which would turn to be a serious situation once there is usually a lot of money involved.
Depending on the type of product, it is possible to find gondolas with sloping shelves, where the products move without the necessity of human interference. It is still not common, but the technology is, once again, helping companies to avoid problems. As you can see in the following video, there is already a technology of automated shelf replenishment. The sad part of the story is that if it becomes normal, humans will, once again, be replaced by machines, increasing practicality, but also unemployment.
As promised, this was a short one haha. I hope this completed the small review about Marketing strategies inside supermarkets, and that you had a great time reading my post.
“Wooow… Gabriel is probably going to talk about a very important Marketing strategy!” Errr… Nah…
When we talk about Marketing, commercials and advertisings are the most common things that come to our minds, but Marketing is much more than that. We usually think how companies advertise their products in order to get the consumers’ attention, but sometimes we forget about the fact that companies not always sell their products directly to the final consumers, which means that those companies still depend on some other people to increase their sales, like grocery stores.
This is exactly where the names of this post comes from: Supermarketing = Supermarket + Marketing = Marketing of Supermarkets. Tell me that you liked my creativity, please… I spent a lot of time creating this title =/…
Companies that sell their products to supermarkets are actually depending on how successfully their products are going to be offered to the consumers. This would make people buy greater quantities, which would make the supermarkets have to increase their inventory, and, consequently, generate more profit to the producer.
It would be very easy to write about how advertisings out of the stores in order to get customers’ attention, small magazines with promotions, commercials and so forth, but I want to go a little bit deeper in this subject. I want to talk about the environment you find when you go to a grocery store.
You might not know but a lot of Marketing strategies are used inside grocery stores, and they are based on consumer buying behavior, which is defined by the BusinessDictionary.com as
“The process by which individuals search for, select, purchase, use, and dispose of goods and services, in satisfaction of their needs and wants.”
Grocery stores’ layout are not only designed to make you feel comfortable, but also willing to spend as much money as you can. This goes through several aspects, like what you will see when you get inside the grocery store, to where you will find the product you want. It is possible to write a full book only about these strategies, but considering that this is not my intention for now, I am only going to mention some of them.
The strategy starts at the moment you arrive at the supermarket. Why do you think that the supermarket entrance gate only works one way? This is not because they are not intelligent enough put a two-way entrance gate, or because they did not have enough money to buy it. This is exactly their strategy. The “one way entrance gate” is there to make it harder for customers to leave the supermarket, and the exit is usually far from the entrance. You may think about leaving the place, but once you are already inside, you already created a connection with the place because of all of the things that are there to call your attention.
After passing through the entrance, you will probably find vegetables and fruits, and once again, they are not for coincidence. Vegetables and fruits are healthy foods and, therefore, make you feel better and comfortable with the place. This is, for example, much better than if you saw toilet papers at the entrance. The experience would certainly be very different.
On the other hand, you should never find milk or eggs near the entrance, unless the owner did not make any research before deciding the organization of his supermarket. Have you ever realized that everything you want seems to be more difficult to find in the supermarket? Milk and eggs are very common items, especially for families, which means that parents will most of the times look for them. This leads to the fact that these items are usually placed far from the entrance or even in hidden places. This means that in order to find these products you will have to walk through the whole store, which will make you more likely to spend money with things that you had not planned. Another interesting factor is that milk and eggs are usually offered with discount, because consumers assume that if they have discount, the whole store would also have it.
You can find some information about this in the following video:
As far as you go into the store, you can realize more strategies. When you look at the shelves of a supermarket, you probably think that the products that are at the top of the shelves are the best or more valuable, but this is not true. The main products are actually placed at the middle of the shelves, because there is probably where your eyes would directly look. In other words, they are placed at the eye-level. At the bottom of the selves, you would find similar products but of worse brands, which means lower prices. Finally, the top is where you would find the least valuable products, because this is the place that you are less likely to look, and also where it is more difficult to get products from.
However, the bottom is also an eye-level, but not for adults… for children. We must confess… when we were children, we were very insistent saying to our parents that they should buy whatever we wanted, and this is another strategy for supermarkets’ owners. They know how insistent a child can be, therefore, this is where children’s interests would be placed.
Another interesting factor is that you are more likely to find important brands at the middle of the sections. This is due to the fact that whatever direction you come from, you would have to walk through the section in order to find what you want, which, once again, could make you buy other products.
But grocery stores not only use Marketing organizing the products, but also invest their money on creative ideas that would generate more profit. What about the supermarket cart? Do you think it is getting bigger? When people go to grocery stores, they feel satisfied when they fill the whole cart with products. Because of this factor, it is estimated that it has increased about 40% in the last 10 years. It is known that some supermarkets even use grooves on the floor. This makes the cart slow down, which induces the consumer to pay attention to what is around, generally important products.
The last factor that I would like to mention is the use of technology to help on designing the supermarket’s layout, and data mining plays an important role in this aspect. This is the definition given by Investopedia.com:
“A process used by companies to turn raw data into useful information. By using software to look for patterns in large batches of data, businesses can learn more about their customers and develop more effective marketing strategies as well as increase sales and decrease costs. Data mining depends on effective data collection and warehousing as well as computer processing.”
By identifying patterns, supermarkets can, for example, check which products are usually bought together. This could led to different decisions like placing them together inside the store, or making combined promotions.
This is it for today, my friends. Writing good posts to increase your Marketing knowledge is what motivates me to put all my effort on this blog.
How much would you spend to make your brand become famous in your city, state, country, or even worldwide?
In the second post of this blog, “More than brand names,” I talked about the importance of brand names in business. By that time, I wrote:
“Getting inside people’s minds is one of the goals of Marketing strategies, and having the brand name recognized by society leads to power, big percentage of the market share, and increased number of sales.”
Let’s pretend you found out the formula of McDonald’s hamburger, and started to produce and sell this product. Do you think you would have the same success of McDonald’s? Probably not. Maybe you could increase the awareness of your business locally, but it would be necessary much more than that in order to defeat McDonald’s.
How many times have you heard that Samsung smartphones were better than iPhones, but at the end, you preferred to buy the Apple device?
Why products with the same characteristics, like detergent, can have big differences in price? All of these factors are consequence of a company’s power inside an industry, which is reflected by customer loyalty, for example.
In the article “What’s Apple’s brand worth? More than $100 billion,” Rex Crum (Oct, 2014) states the following:
“When it comes to determining a company’s worth, the easiest way to do so is to look at its stock price, multiply that by its shares outstanding, and you get a value for its market capitalization… But there is also the value that a company gets from its brand, and what customers attribute to the power of that brand.”
Companies have many types of assets. When you think about what a company owns, you probably think about its structure: equipment, factory, building, stores etc. However, have you ever thought about a company “having its own brand name” as an asset? Investopedia defines intangible asset as:
“An asset that is not physical in nature. Corporate intellectual property (items such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, business methodologies), goodwill and brand recognition are all common intangible assets in today’s marketplace.”
According to Forbes (calculated in November 2014), the most valuable company’s brand name is Apple, which is worth $124,2 billion. You can check the list in the link below:
Therefore, it is clear that companies usually spend years and millions of dollars developing and creating value to its brand name. But let’s think for a second… what if you reached this success, and this were all destroyed overnight?
A lot of different factors can strongly harm a company’s image and directly affects its reputation. Not only customer’s distrust have huge effects on sales, but also outside investors lose interest on investing their money. Companies can even lose some opportunities to promote their brands, which can prevent a company from overcoming a bad situation.
Let’s pretend you were the responsible of Super Bowl’s commercials and you were negotiating with companies in a specific day. Two days before, one of those companies were in the newspaper accused of slave child labor. Would you want that company sponsoring your event? Would you want your event’s image connected to slave child labor? I do not think so.
Nike has faced several accusations through the years. It is always a challenge to recover its image and avoid significant decrease in sales. Worker abuse and child labor are some examples that made Nike be shamed in public. Fortunately, Nike’s economic power was crucial to overcome all those situations. You can check more some information about this subject in the links below:
However, it is not always possible for a company to recover from those types of crisis. PRIDE, a Japanese company, used to be the biggest MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) organization of the world. In 2002, PRIDE held the largest MMA event audience record with of 91,000 people.
Everything seemed to be in control until the day that a connection with Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, came out. PRIDE consequently lost sponsors, TV channels stopped transmitting its event, and some problems with local laws harmed the organization. This led to an increasingly decrease of its value, until the day that the organization was bought by Zuffa, which also owns UFC, the current biggest MMA event of the world.
Reputation problems, however, can be also a consequence of external factors that affect the daily business of a company. For this, I am going to use Ambev as an example.
In Brazil, most of beers of 600ml used to be sold in the same type of bottle, and this factor contributed to the falsification of Skol, an Ambev’s beer. Criminals were changing the label of bottles and selling cheap beers with Skol labeling, which was a devastating to Ambev’s sellings when the scandal came out.
Skol lost a significant market share, and even ceased to be the most sold beer in some states. Ambev had to overcome that problem, and as a big company, with a lot of money and a huge structure, Ambev was able to produce a new bottle, inexistent in the market, with 630ml. Besides the promotional side of this innovation, once it was sold by the same price with more liquid, the bottle was unique, directly fighting against possible frauds.
The interesting part of name value is that it is not only related to companies, but also people. Did you ever realize that companies constantly use famous people in their commercials? Probably. They also sponsor them so they will use their products to promote the brand for their fans. In these cases, the fans are usually the target market.
People’s name also have their value. It is never a good idea when people talk bad things about you, right? It works like a “personal marketing.” Your image needs to be preserved. Therefore, if you are famous, you have to be very careful with everything you do not to harm your reputation. Sometimes it is not only the image that is threatened, but considering that you name works like a company promoting products and services, a lot of money is involved.
Have you heard about Tiger Woods scandal? Before November 2009, there was only one definition for Tiger Woods: the best Golf player of the world. He was even named by Forbes in October 2009 as the first athlete to earn $1 billion. But at that year, many infidelity cases started to be reported by the media, and his career would be harmed forever. Tiger Woods lost several sponsorships, and the idol became just a hated person for many of his fans. According to Wikipedia, “A December 2009 study estimated the shareholder loss caused by Woods’ affairs to be between $5 billion and $12 billion.” Check out these links:
Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, one of the biggest in sport history, had a huge effect in his professional and career and personal life. For the professional side, he lost all his seven Tour de France titles. For the Marketing and personal side, he even achieved the mark of losing eight sponsors in a single day. More information in the links below:
As you can see, name seems to be a very important “product” in Marketing. A brand reputation can be affected by several different factors, and it is always important to follow the line not to take any risk of devaluing its name.
As always, I hope you all enjoyed reading this post!
As you can read, the subtitle of this blog is “Beyond touches, feelings, minds and nations.” There is a strong reason for that as I explained in the first post of this blog, and today I am going to use “beyond nations” to explain some Marketing concepts through my personal experience.
I am from Brazil and, I did my internship in a brewing company over there. You remember that, right? Right???… anyway… this company’s name is Ambev, and as a Brazilian company, I feel it is a good idea to spend some words introducing the biggest company of Brazil.
“Ambev, formally Companhia de Bebidas das Américas (official English translation: “Americas’ Beverage Company”, hence the name “Ambev”, formerly styled as “Ambev”) is a Brazilian brewing company. It is the biggest brewery in Latin America and the fifth in the world.”
Ambev operates in 14 countries, including Brazil, and is one of the companies owned by a bigger company called AB Inbev. If you did not recognize, AB are the letters that represent Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser’s producer. AB Inbev is also the Anheuser-Busch’s owner. Now you recognized, right? Let’s move on.
It is normal that very big beverage companies produce many different types of beverages, and some of them compete against each other. Ambev, for example, produces 31 types of beer, but they are not sold together in all the countries in which Ambev is present.
In Brazil, for example, the most popular beers sold by this company are Antarctica, Brahma, and Skol. But what would you do in order to guarantee that all of them would have their “personal” market share instead of killing each other?
There is a Marketing concept called “market segmentation”, and this is where things start. Here is the definition given by Investopedia.com.
“A marketing term referring to the aggregating of prospective buyers into groups (segments) that have common needs and will respond similarly to a marketing action. Market segmentation enables companies to target different categories of consumers who perceive the full value of certain products and services differently from one another.”
In other words, segmenting your marketing is one of the strategies used when companies target the market. Offering a product to the right people is a basic factor to succeed in an industry. Competition shows up exactly among two companies that are trying to reach the same market.
In some industries, companies are able to adapt their product according to the necessities of the target market. In the backpack industry, for example, companies can address their product to children, university students, luxury consumers etc. For soda industry, there are “cola” sodas like Pepsi and Coca-Cola, lemon sodas, and more. Therefore, there are also different types of soda. However, let’s pretend you produce two different sodas of the same type like Pepsi and Coca Cola. The target market, from a general perception, is the same: people who like cola soda.
This is exactly what happens with Ambev. Ambev owns 70% of Brazil’s brewing market share, and they certainly want to keep or increase it. Antarctica, Brahma and Skol are constantly competing against each other considering that they are exactly the same type of beer: Pilsener. It is obvious that their flavors are different, but each one of them also need to have a Marketing strategy to promote themselves.
Price has obviously been a strong role in dividing the market, because not only are there direct competitors produced by other companies, but it also helps to reach different segments of the society according to what they are able to pay.
Ambev, however, has a very special way to segment their markets. Considering that they do not try to say that one brand is better than the other, Ambev’s strategy is to connect each brand with popular events and activities of the Brazilian society. Check out the commercials and ads below.
Antarctica represents popular events. Carnival and “samba”, which are very famous in Brazil, are constantly connected to this brand…
…Brahma, on the other hand, is the brand of soccer. It is one of the main sponsors of Brazilian soccer championship, and almost all of its advertisements are made connecting the brand to the sport…
It is very interesting how Ambev was able to save a slice of the market for all of its brands, make them work together, and guarantee that their brands would not “kill each other.” Considering these three beers and all the other “premium” beers, Ambev reaches the whole beer market, giving no space for competitors.
Today, price is the biggest Ambev’s enemy. Competitors try to defeat them offering more aggressive prices, and Ambev can not decrease its price not to devalue the brands.
In the last few years, Itaipava has been the biggest threat to Ambev’s popular beer brands, and started to “steal” a good market share from Ambev. Instead of “working” their current brands in different ways to recover the market share, Ambev took advantage of its economic power and created a new brand called Skol 360 to be sold cheaply and recover the market.
For this one, not to lose the Marketing strategy, Ambev connected the brand with one of the most popular activities in Brazil: Brazilian barbecue.
That is it for today, my friends. I hope you have enjoyed to know a little bit more about this Brazilian company, and that you were able to realize that Marketing is definetely an universal tool.
Why do you prefer to buy specific products? Do you always have a very strong reason to decide for a product instead of another? Or sometimes, you know.. they have something that you just do not know what is, but for some reason, they attract you?
Marketing strategies are developed to attract and convince people about their products’/services’ usability and quality. The hidden part of this subject is that every decision made by a customer is related to psychological factors that accepted one brand more than another. A research made by Caroline Winnett and Andrew Pohlmann of The Nielsen Company revealed that “While our brains process 11 million bits of sensory information every second, our conscious minds handle less than one hundred per second in comparison.”
Considering psychological and behavioral consumer studies, there are two very interesting and important phrases to pay attention:
– According to Zaltman, G. (2013), a Harvard Business School professor, “95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.”
– According to Shapiro, T. (2013), “All purchase behavior is emotional. So, if you want to maximize your marketing results, your marketing needs to evoke an emotional response in your prospective client’s heart and mind.”
For this reason, companies are increasingly investing time and money to deeply and effectively achieve their customers.
The intention of this post is not to give a full explanation about the connection between Marketing and Psychology, but only to introduce you to this subject through some real examples.
Did you know that each color emotionally affects you in different ways? Using colors correctly is probably the easiest way to cause an impact in people’s minds. For example, colors are even used in logos to identify different types of businesses: yellow for food brands and green for enviromental brands. In the article “Marketing to Subconscious,” Shapiro, T. says that “According to the University of Loyola, Maryland, color increases brand recognition by a whopping 80%. Yellow conveys happiness, optimism and friendliness, while grabbing attention. And this is precisely why McDonald’s, Hertz, Nikon, Best Buy and IKEA use the color extensively in their marketing.”
The image below explains the meaning of some colors and gives some examples of brands that use them.
Combined with colors, forms have also powerful effects on customers, and they are specially used in packages and logos designs. For example, curves indicates softness and comfort, which explains why companies such as Coca Cola and Apple are so dedicated using these features to advertise and create their products.
Here you can find information about a study connecting packages design and subconscious mind.
Moreover, not only logos and packages can change your perception about a brand. Have you ever heard about Shreddies? This is a whole-grain cereal sold in Canada, Britain and New Zealand. The interesting factor occurred when an intern came with the brilliant idea of changing its form in order to add value to the brand. However, would you imagine that this brilliant idea was just to rotate the cereal 45 degrees? Check out the video below.
This case represents how human behavior and tastes are connected to internal factors. How could a person experiment the same cereal in different positions and say that one is more flavorful than the other? There is only one explanation for that: Psychology. The diamond shape gave the brand a much more valued status than the simple square. Even if it was the same cereal, the sales considerably increased because of the marketing campaign of the “new” cereal.
By the way… I strongly recommend you to watch the full version of this video, which was a Ted Talk presented in 2009 by Rory Sutherland. Here is the link:
Besides all these ways of getting people’s attention, here is my favorite one: How a brand verbally communicates with its customers. In 2009, Simon Sinek presented a Ted Talk called How Great Leaders Inspire Action. In this presentation, he discusses the difference between how normal and inspirational leaders and companies communicate with people, and everything is explained by the image below:
Simple, right? But very powerful. According to Simon Sinek, normal companies and leaders communicate from the outside to the inside (What -> Why). An example of that would be if Apple communicated like this:
“We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?”
But actually, as an inspirational company, Apple does the opposite. Apple communicates from the inside to the outside (Why -> What). Here is how Apple really communicates:
“Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”
The big lesson from this presentation, from a Marketing perspective, is the fact that people not only buy your product, but also buy your idea. Customers are more likely to identify themselves with a brand if the brand in some way affects them emotionally. This, however, is not only explained by Psychological factors, but also Biological. I ask your permission to quote a big but very interesting part of Simon Sinek’s speech.
“…the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the “what” level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It’s also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language…In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn’t drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do.”
If you would like to watch this video, here is the link:
Remember when you got hurt playing, for accident, when you cut yourself, etc? Did you look for a bandage or a Band-Aid? Did you ever call your friends to play with a flying saucer? What about having called them to play Frisbee? Do you use adhesive note pads or Post-It? Cotton swab or Q-Tip?
Some brand names are so powerful that in the course of time, people start referring to them as nouns and verbs. This does not happen with all brands, which means that companies that achieved this place in the society can be proud of successfully making a connection with their customers. In the article “Google This: What it Means When a Brand Becomes a Verb,” Hoban, M. (2013) says that “We FaceTime and Skype but we generally don’t Facebook or YouTube. We Google but we do not Bing (at least not yet). We Rollerblade but we do not Slinky. In past years, we would Xerox but would never Polaroid.” It is extremely interesting to realize how brand names can become part of our daily activities, but who told you that it is always good for the companies? Let’s understand.
Marketing, according to the definition approved by the American Marketing Association Board of Directors (AMA) in 2013, is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
Neil H. Borden created the concept of Marketing Mix. This concept is represented by a list of 12 factors that marketers should pay attention before marketing their products or services. These factors were later condensed by Jerome E. McCarthy into four main areas: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. This group of categories are known as the 4P’s of marketing.
The 4P’s can be easily identified in the formal definition of Marketing:
You can check the videos below to get more information. They are very helpful.
For this time, our focus will be on Promotion.
A company is successful with its products or services when it accomplishes the goals of making people become interested in paying for them, have a good experience with them, and remember their names in order to look for it again. Promotion represents the process of communicating with the customers, and as the name says, promoting it effectively.
Getting inside people’s minds is one of the goals of Marketing strategies, and having the brand name recognized by society leads to power, big percentage of the market share, and increased number of sales. If you had enough financial condition, and making economic choices were not a problem for you, would you buy products of that well-known brand or of the other one that you have never heard about? Probably of the known one.
Brand names are as powerful as products. Living in an era where intangible values can worth millions of dollars, loyalty and social acceptance can easily make people choose their products based on the power of some certain brand names instead of the product, even if its quality is not as reliable as it was once. How many debates discussing Android vs iOS have you heard or read about? Even in moments where people could guarantee that Apple’s products were not the best anymore, many people could still swear that they would never change an iPhone for a Galaxy, for example. This is all consequence of how Apple was able to get inside people’s mind and make them believe that there was nothing better than their products. Many people do not say the word “tablet”. In their minds, every tablet are actually iPads.
Therefore, it is clear that it is a real good point when the brand name is remembered, but even if you do not believe, having a very well known name brand could actually become a threat.
Brand names that are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are called trademarks, and for that reason, the company has legal rights for the usage of its name, which means that someone else cannot use this. But what if the trademark is so famous that people use it constantly? Would you still have control of the name?
Did you know that Viagra, Xerox, Q-Tip, Velcro, Zipper, Post-It, Zip Code and many other are or were trademarks?
The process of “genericization” is characterized by companies of which the name became so common that instead of representing an unique product, started to represent a whole class of project. The continuous growth of the usage of a trademark can lead this to become a proprietary eponyms, which according to Shontell, A. (2010) are, “general words that are, or were at one time, company trademarks.”
Quirk, M. (2014) genericize may occur for different reasons:
Failing to renew the trademark rights or abandoning it
Having the trademark canceled in a court
Failing to register the trademark
Aspirin, for example, was a Bayer AG trademark, but because Bayer’s U.S. assets were confiscated as a consequence of World War I, they lost their rights from its name.
Escalator was an Otis’ trademark, but the U.S. Patent Office considered that even Otis used the name as a generic term for the patent. The trademark was then officially considered a generic term.
There are a lot of examples of companies who lost their trademark, and even companies that are still fighting in order to maintain their rights, like Xerox and Kleenex.
Can you imagine a company making advertisements discouraging people to use their name as a generic term? Take a look at this.
There are so many things to learn about this subject. If you felt interested, I strongly recommend you to take a look at the references of this post. Marketing changes the world and even our vocabulary. Is not it magic?
I am going to finish this post recommending you to watch a very interesting video in the website below.
Hello guys! Welcome to my first blog, first blog post, and first initiative to share my knowledge, thoughts and ideas!
I hope you all have a great experience spending your very precious time reading what I have to say. I promise I will try my best to make everything interesting and, of course, as fun as possible! I believe this is an incredible chance of developing critical thinking, absorbing Marketing vision, and growing as a professional. If you share the same thoughts, this is the right place for you!
Well, my name is Gabriel, but if you prefer, you can call me, ahn, Gabriel. Sorry, I do not have a nickname. I am from Brazil, “that very beautiful country,” “the country of soccer,” “the country of beautiful women.” How do you know that? Did you ever travel to Brazil? Probably not. Welcome, baby! This is Marketing!
Let’s keep going. I was born in Rio de Janeiro and I lived there until Mar/14. Since then, after being selected in a Government scholarship program, I have been studying in Saint Michael’s College, VT, USA. My mother always wanted me to be a military officer or mechanical engineer, but my major is Information Systems, and deep inside I love Business and Marketing. Crazy? Maybe. But I promise you that everything is connected. I am currently having the opportunity of introducing myself in the Business field. By the end of my scholarship, I will have completed all the requirements of a minor in Business. Yes, I am not a crazy programmer.
Saint Michael’s College – Dion Family Student Center – Photo by: Gabriel Ventura
In 2012, me and two more friends created an event promotion website. This was my first experience with Marketing. Convincing people that it was worthy to follow our website was certainly a big challenge. Besides this, promoting events successfully by advertisings and social media were also part of our tasks. In 2013, I got an internship in a multinational beverage company, and currently the biggest company of Brazil. In this company, Marketing was present everywhere: packages, advertisings, commercials, price, contracts, and much much more. This close contact made me understand and become fascinated about how powerful and important Marketing could be.
Now that you all know me a little bit more, it is time to start the blog itself.
The name of this blog was chosen based on two reasons: my scholarship and the world we live. First, this program of which I am part of is called “Science Without Borders.” In short, its intention is to send Brazilian students to other countries to improve their knowledge, so they would become better professionals in the future. Second, in the era of globalization, world interaction, and communication, everything is scattered worldwide, including Marketing. Brands are all over the world, anyone can watch your video and see your advertisings online, or you can become famous tomorrow with something viral. This is the era of promoting, and there is nothing better for promotion than Marketing tools. Marketing Without Borders represents not only the greatness of Marketing in our lives, but the huge proportion that Marketing strategies can achieve, and the lack of limit of places that could be reached.
This blog is a project of my BU-215 Marketing course. This, however, does not mean that I will not take this opportunity to have something professional. As you can see, this is going to be a Marketing based blog, but expect to find here more than that. I will always try to connect concepts from different areas and real life.
As a new student in the area and a lover of new knowledge, I surely appreciate any kind of feedback, perceptions, opinions and enriching debates. Feel free to participate!
Marketing Without Borders 
