Corner

Corner is a spanish pub which is part of the franchise "Cafe de Indias". In Seville (Spain) it is very popular among young people. This pub sales food and alcoholic drinks and hosts many people every day. As you now beers are cheaper than other alcoholic drinks such as rhum, vodka. gin or whiskey.
Now, what this pub has done in order to invrease the sales of these drinks is promoting a special offer among costumers. It consists on rolling a dice and paying for the drink the number on the dice. This special offer doesn´t need  paid publicity beacuse young people for sure would tell their friends about this by mouth in mouth publicity. This offer undoubtfully will grow succesful because it is enjoyable and you can get a good price for your drink.

Johnnie Walker

When you drive a car after drinking, you are as fragile as glass. That's the message that Johnnie Walker wanted to convey with this spot, trying to raise awareness about the danger driving under the influence of alcohol implies. # ImNOTdriving is the slogan of the campaign and also the hashtag seeking to spread this initiative and generate conversation on social networks.

Under the appereane of a car ad, the spot builds a Vodafone McLaren Mercedes with crystal glasses, a visual metaphor that shows how fragile it can be when a car driven by someone who has been drinking. Moreover, to reinforce the message, the campaign has the support of the cars pilot Mika Häkkinen, who is also the brands image

Price cues

Price cues are tactics used by brands to persuade customers to buy the product. Price cues, as the name says, afects the price of the product and aims to make it more atractive for the customer  than other brand´s. When a person is going to make a purchase the decission making process is the last step so it is very important to price well the product. This is used when products are purchased not very frecuently and when consumers don´t have much knowedge of the product.
Some ways of making the price atractive is by odd number discount perceptions, ending prices in 0 or 5 and "left to right" pricing (pricing a product on 0.99$ instead than on 1$). Left to right pricing affects the perception of the customer and gives him the impresion of being cheaper.

Apple

Apple is probably the most popular company in the electronic devices market. It is well known for the quality of the products it manufactures and sales. Due to the very high quality, the products are very expensive (but still very popular) and the gives the brand an image of exclusivity.

A couple of months ago Apple launched Iphone5, a very expensive product. At first the company thought of launching at the same time Iphone5c, which was going to be a lowcost version of it. With the lowcost version the company aimed to target consumers with a lower income power, but at the end the lowcost version wasn´t launched and Iphone5c was just another version of the new product. Probably the company changed its mind beacause it would have affected the exclusivity of the product.

Red Bull

As probably most of you know Red Bull is a very popular energetic drink. This company does a great job with it´s product merchandising. It is very common to see vans with the logo of the company giving out free samples of the drink mainly nearby sports events. The logo of the brand is a bull, a brave and strong animal, it fits very well with the image the brand wants to give, an energetic drink mainly consumed by extreme sportsmen. This company has also sponsored one of the biggest events in the last years. I am talking about Felix Baumgartner jumping from the stratosfere. This event was watched by millions of people and the company took advatage of this and sponsored the event. For Red Bull it was a complete success, it got a great publicity and favored it´s brand image.

Sales promotion

Sales promotion is a very popular way used by companies to create awareness of a product. For example, a very effective way of promoting food products is by giving free samples at supermarkets. The best way to create product awareness and demonstrating it´s quality is by letting the costumers try it and judge by theirselves. Another very good promotion strategy is the one carrried out by Nescafe. This coffee seller brand offers a prize of 3000 euros each birthday for a person who finds a special code in its product.
These types of strategies stimulate people to purchase the products.

Creative strategy

When you see an advertisement on television it has the intention of informing, convincing individuals to purchase a product. There are many ways of designing how you want to communicate the message you want to give to people and one of them is the creative strategy. When this strategy is used. the efectiveness of the product is shown during the ad. This type of strategy is very common in detergents in which usually there is a dirty shirt, but when the product is used on it, the spot disappears. The efectiveness of the product is demonstrated to everyone as you can see in the video.

Fails in Marketing 3

Multinational companies have to be careful when doing business abroad. Sometimes products don´t sell well in new markets and need to be changed in some way.

 A soap powder advertisemnet had a picture of dirty clothes in the left, a box of soap in the middle and clean clothes on the right. The soap did not sell well in the Middle East. As you know arabs read from the right to the left, so they understood that by using the product they will get their clothes dirtier.

The spanish drink "Gaseosa Revoltosa" is not exported to english speaking countries. It would not be very popular because it sounds like revolting and english revolting means disgusting. You wouldn´t buy a product wich´s name indicates is disgusting would you?

Virtual Shopping

Tesco  has been developing and adjusting itself to the local markets. Koreans are considered the second most hardworking people in the world, and for these people going once a week to do the shopping is a pain due to the lack of time. So what this company did to increase the sales was letting the store come to the people by launching a campaign called Tesco HomePlus. They created a virtual store which was displayed as the original store amd they placed them in subway stations. People could buy while waiting for the subway by using their smartphones to read code bars. Once the purchase is done they would have the products delivered at their homes without having to visit the real store. As a result online sales rose in a 130% and  Tesco became the second most popular grocery company in Korea and without increasing the number of stores.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeYgnJzOEJs

Publicity in social networks

With the pass of time the world keeps developing and so does technology. Because technology is the future, many companies have to modernize and if they want to increase their importance in the market they most probably should start selling products online. Stadistics show that last year over a 13% of the purchases made las year were made through the internet. People who buy this way are mostly young people who have been raised up with technology, these pepople are called E-consumers. Enterprises know this, and as a consequence, it is very common to see commercials in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Tuenti. Must be said that social networks are used by young people who also are potential e-consumers, that is why commercials seen in this sites are usually about sports clothing, videogames and things youngsters are interested in. Most companies which do this are targeting the market segment of young population.

Fails in Marketing 2

Now we are going to give some more examples of companies which have had some trouble in some countries with their marketing campaign. The problems explained today are related to transport.

Today´s first example is about cars. Nissan, a car seller and manufacturer company has named one of their last vehicle "Nissan Moco". Unfortunately for the company this product does not sell well in spanish-speaking markets, especially the green model. The reason fot this is that "moco" is the spanish word for snot, this might sound stupid but its true. People don´t loke to drive snots.

Secondly, an airline company called itself EMU after the australian bird. Australians did not want to use the airline. Probably the people who decided the name of the company should have made some research before. People don´t have to know this beacuse it is not general culture but most australians know that emus can not fly. For them its like calling "Kamikaze" the company

3x2

It is very usual to see in many food stores (local shops, supermarkets...) promotions such as buy two get another one for free. Of course this atracts costumers, but that is not the only point of it. Lets say you are doing your weekly shopping and when you buy cookies you find out there is
a 3x2, great! Each week you keep purchasing the same cookies and taking advantage on the discount, by doing this your are generating a need of 3 packs of cookies per week. The problem is that ,eventually, the discount will finish and you will still have the generated need of 3 packs instead of two, so you will have to buy 3 packs and pay all of them.

Black Friday

Black Friday is an american tradition which started on the 70s, it takes place the weekend after thanksgiving. It is called Black Friday because the companies pass from negative results (red numbers) to positive (black numbers). During this weekend companies offer a great amount of  big discounts. By doing this they encourage people to make their christmas shopping. Though there is one month left for christmas, in these times of crisis people are more price sensitive and take advantage of the discounts. That is the reason why Black Friday is so profitable and specially these days.

Fails in marketing

Some companies have very successful products in the country they belong to, but when they export the product to another country these products ae not very popular for different reasons.
For example, an American golf ball manufacturer launched their products in Japan packed in boxes of four. The company had to change the pack size because in Japan the number 4 is pronounced as death and it is related to bad luck.
A bread seller company named its product Bimbo, sellings were good in Spain but this brand would have problems if selling in english speaking countries. For those of you who are not native english speakers, the word bimbo is used to refer to an atractive but unintelligent women in a derogatory way.

Publicity

In order to increase sales, companies have to create brand awareness, and the most common way of doing this is by publicity, specially on television. A very populat tv show called Top Chef is sponsored by an electronic cooking devices company seller which´s name is mentioned a big number of times during the show. Also sometimes there is a brief pause on the show to make pubicity of one of the products (an oven for example). By doing these things customers became aware of the existance of the product. Having this brand sponsoring such a popular show and very famous chefs making publicity of the product also makes it look as a very high quality product. This increases the attention of potential buyers.

Brand image

This afternoon I was watching television when I saw a commercial of a dietetic cereal bar which a pretty thin girl was happily eating. Then I thought: "Why would a girl like her eat dietetic bars?" The answer is easy: brand image, this is the impression the brand tries to cause on your mind. If you eat this product you will get a nice body. Thats is why this kind of advertisements are not starred by fat people ( the product´s main consumers). Think about it, this kind of advertisements are very common, there is one in which a man uses a deodorant and women literally fall to his feet. I´m sure there plenty of these in your countries and in my opinion brand image is like a little lie, so be aware of it!!

Madrid Games Week

This weekend Madrid is holding a very important event in the gaming world, the Madrid Games Week. During a few days the city of Madrid enables a space to hold this event, which is expected to be attended by thousands of visitors. Many important comapnies are taking part on this event, such as Sony and Nintendo,  these companies are going to make several presentations on their future projects and the videogames they will be launching soon. We could say this event has two objectives: a general one and an individual one. Lets esxpalin this: if being entertained is a need, this event tries to make videogames a want, and individually each company tries to make it´s videogames a demand by letting people try games for free in this event.

Coca Cola

The first company we are going to deal with is CocaCola, CocaCola has recently launched in Spain named cans. Though this campaign started in Australia, it´s popularity has brought it to europe, the objective is to give the customer a feeling of importance, as if they were part of the CocaCola family. In Spain there are over 100 common names in the cans.
 This strategy mainly affects the decission making process of a posible client. Lets say you are in a supermarket and you want to buy a drink, first of all the named cans would certainly call your attention. Once this has happened you might look for your name or even a friend´s or relative´s name and buy it just for making a present out of it or even a joke.
Unconciously your attention is called with this campaign and you are turned into a potencial costumer.

Introduction

Hello bloggers! My name is Salvador Benjumea, I´m a spanish first year business administration student.
The intention of this blog is to talk about the latest marketing strategies different companies are carrying.
Please enjoy it and feel free to comment!