Direct Marketing: Techniques And Ways Of Marketing - Essay Example

Direct Marketing: Techniques And Ways Of Marketing Direct marketing is perceived by many customers as an undesirable way of marketing products. Direct marketing includes techniques such as telephone sales and unsolicited emails. When companies rely on these techniques their credibility as a firm is downgraded. There are other forms of legit direct marketing techniques that have been used by marketers for years to generate revenues. Some of these good direct marketing techniques include catalogs, leaflets, brochures, and coupons. A company that has been very successful globally using a direct marketing approach to sell its products is Amway. Interactive marketing involves having contact with the customer in order to obtain a reaction and feedback from them. The tool that is utilized the most in the 21st century in the application of interactive marketing is the internet. Social websites such as Facebook provide great interactive mechanisms that can be used by marketers to communicate with the customers. A website that revolutionized the way people watch programming is Hulu.com. Hulu offers television programs in its website free of charge. The programming has very short commercial breaks. During these commercials many advertisers used interactive marketing by providing short one question questionnaires. 7. Samir - participation I like your response but you failed to mention a direct marketing method that is often by companies which is direct telephone sales calls. This method of marketing is very outdated and his perceived in a negative connotation by the customers of today. Nobody likes being pressure into buying a consumer product they don’t want or need. I think that the government should regulate telemarketers to avoid the invasion of privacy these sales phone calls represent. Most of these companies are obtaining their sales leads number using unethical practices. I think that interactive marketing has a lot of potential for companies doing business the US marketplace as well as abroad. 8. Kelly – participation Convenience is one of the attributes customers look for the most in their shopping experience. A company that has revolutionized the supermarket industries is Sainsbury’s. This UK firm has a service that allows shoppers to purchase their groceries through the website. The online order is subsequently delivered to the person’s home. This service saves shoppers a lot of time and it saves them money in commuting expenses. At $4 a gallon customers have to save gasoline any way they can. Other companies such as Walgreens are achieving interactive marketing by offering special offers that can only be redeemed online. For example when the customer completes an online survey at the corporate website they are eligible for coupon savings. DQ1 An advertising campaign that was very successful due to its ingenuity, creativity, and ability to captivate the minds of the viewers was the Geico ads. Geico has been running a series of ads using the Gecko character in order to transmit a Geico’s slogan, “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.” The ads are very funny due to the Gecko character. The Gecko has become such a sensation that Geico created an autobiography online video story of the Gecko on its corporate website. This is all great stuff. I believe that this character is the reason Geico has become such a successful auto insurance company. Prior to the start of the Gecko series of commercials Geico was not a household name in the minds of American consumers. An ad campaign that lacks a marketing message due to its simplicity is Corona’s beer advertisements. These commercials consist of a man and woman in the beach in lawn chair, the actors done move while stuff occurs around them at the admiration of the Corona beer. The commercial are poor because they do not send a clear marketing message and they are not emphasizing any of the attributes of the product such as quality, flavor, and price. The commercial seem like a low budget project in comparison with the spectacular commercials its competitor Coors Light utilizes. 2. After reading the article Got Emotional Product Positioning? I started to think whether there any truth behind the concept of emotions affecting the customer behavior of a person. I applied that logic to my personal consumption in the consumer markets. Well apparently there is a lot of truth to it. I buy Starbuck Café sometimes not because I’m a coffee lover, but because this company supports fair trade coffee. Fair trade coffee is a practice which is helping the lives of thousands of farmers across the world. Fair trade coffee guarantees the farmers a minimum price per pound of coffee of $1.26 which is twice the going rate in the wholesale markets. I thought about my selection of fast foods. I always like to go McDonald’s because when I look at their kids’ park it reminds me when my parents used to take me there to celebrate my birthday. Both my buying decisions were based on emotions. The use of product positioning can be a very effective marketing strategy. General Motors in order to penetrate the hybrid marketplace created the Chevy Volt vehicle which is positioned to attract people look to purchase environmentally friendly green vehicles. Due to the power of emotions marketers have to use them effectively when they are transmitting marketing messages. A pitfall mentioned in the article is that companies must be careful about using emotions in messages when there are cultural differences to consider in a particular marketplace. Mahajan,V., Wind, Y. (2002), Got Emotional Product Positioning, Marketing Management. 3. participation – Samir I agree with you that the Marboro Man advertising campaign was one of the most effective campaigns that the tobacco industry has ever experienced. I think the Marboro Man became such a popular figure because smokers felt that the character was a real American that liked his tobacco. Facebook is a great site, but not all products should be advertised using this medium. When companies do not take advantage of the communication interaction capabilities that Facebook offers they are not optimizing the use of the marketing channel. The Marboro Man is recognized by smokers across the globe; he is a true international figure. 4. participation – professor An ad campaign that is currently running on many television networks is the State Farm ads. The series of State Farm ads give the state farm agent the ability to appear on the spot at the accident and to transport themselves along with the client to different locations. The company has used guess starts in the commercials such as TV host legend Bob Barker. The commercials are fun to watch and provide a message that State Farm will always be there to serve the needs of its customers. Good commercials are able to attract the interest of the customers. 5. participation - Mark I had never before heard of Groupon until now. Sounds like a great company. A hot trend you mentioned in your response which a lot of companies are created to keep up with the expectations of the customers of the 21st century is mobile applications. People love to add new mobile applications to their phones because to them doing so is adding greater utility and value to their smartphones. Smartphones were a tremendous hit in the marketplace and there are here to stay. Companies have to pay close attention to the quality control of their ads. A bad ad can turn a customer off so much that they might switch to a competitor. 6. participation - Dave I agree with you that Nike Corporation has done wonders with its Just Do it Campaign. The reason Nike has become an icon of the popular crowds is because the firm has done a fabulous job of recruiting the top athletes in professional sports. Michael Jordan was the greatest player of his era. I can’t believe you mentioned the Bo Knows campaign. That is old school. I loved Bo Jackson he was an explosive athlete that played at a high level in both baseball and football. People were amazed at what could he do on the field. It is always a good idea to sign athletes that have a good connection with the people. Article Review The article What People Want (And How to Predict It) provides lots of valuable marketing information about consumer buying patterns (Davenport & Harris, 2009). Will Smith is one of my favorite actors. He has a tremendous background as a television series star and he took his talent to Hollywood and has made millions at the box office. As a successful movie star Will Smith takes his job very seriously. He uses his wisdom and experience in the industry to evaluate movie alternatives based on the desires of movie enthusiast. One of the common trends that he found in the best selling movies of all time was that all of them made major investments in special effects. Predicting the success of a movie is difficult because the beauty of the movie is in the eyes of the beholder. Many consider movie making more of an art than a science. One of the most important topics discussed in the article is the fact that marketers are using technologies to predict consumer behavior. In the 1990’s Amazon used a collaborative filtering software to analyze customers past choices to make correlations about other products the customer might like. Netflix has also used similar technologies to predict which movies the customer like based on their previous ratings of movies they watched on Netflix. I believe that the use of technologies shows that predictive customer behavior is more of a science than an art. Art cannot be quantifiable which makes it hard to use as a proven method to predict behavior. Davenport, T., Harris, J. (2009). What People Want (And How to Predict It). MIT Sloan Management Review. Chapter Twenty Summary Companies need to develop new products in to order to achieve sales growth in their existing marketplaces or by entering new marketplaces. New products help shape a company’s future. New products are added either through acquisition or development. Three forms of acquisition are acquiring a company, buying a patent and buying a licensee or franchise. Product development can be achieved either by developing the product internally or outsourcing the function to an external firm. There are six categories of new products. The six categories are: New-to-the-world products New product lines Additions to existing product lines Improvements and revisions to existing product lines Repositions Cost reductions Innovation is needed in an economy of rapid change such the one we are experiencing in the 21st century. Established firms focused on incremental innovation. The strategy used by newer firms is to create disruptive technologies that are cheaper. Product development can be hinder by a variety of factors. Three of these factors are: fragmented markets, costs of development, and shorter product life cycles. A technique that is used by many companies today to design new products is customer driven engineering. It is important for managers to create separate budgets for product development. The regular operations cannot interfere with the product development process. The product development process must be divided into stages. A five stage process for the development of new products is: idea screening, concept testing, product development, test marketing, and national launch. New product development teams can be organized into venture teams. Venture teams are cross functional teams charged with developing a new product. The development process starts with the idea generation. Managers can improve the creativity of their staff by using certain techniques. Four techniques that can be used to generate ideas are attribute listing, forced relationships, morphological analysis, ad reverse assumption analysis. Concept testing involves presenting the product concept to target customers and getting their reactions. Co-joint analysis has become one of the most popular concept development and testing tools. There are different life cycles for different types of products. Three types of products are one-time purchase products, infrequently purchased products, and frequently purchased products. An analysis that can be used by marketers to determine how many sales are needed to cover the costs is breakeven analysis. Market testing can be perfumed by performing simulated tests. Once market testing is complete the last stage of the product development process is commercialization. Adoption is an individual’s decision to become a regular user of a product. The five stages of the adoption process are: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption. Weekly Summary: Week Five Week five was a good week that enabled me to learn at an adequate pace without the added stress of some of the other previous weeks. In the weekly discussion and participation one of the topics that were discussed was good and bad advertising campaigns. This discussion was quite interesting since most television viewers have an opinion when they watch a bad commercial. The campaign that one my classmates mentioned which has survived through decades of scrutiny is the Marboro Man campaign. During the team B paper I learned how to develop a communication and promotional campaign for a new product. One of the articles that I read this week which I liked a lot was the What People Want (And How to Predict It) article. One of the things that I liked about the article was that it has applications to the entertainment industry. Another article that caught my attention during the week was the Got Emotional Product Positioning? After I completed the lecture of this article I realized that emotions play a powerful role in the customer’s buying decisions. Read More