Last but not least!

Since I’m in college whether in Spain or in USA I’ve been trained to think out of the box to develop brilliant ideas while working on marketing. However, this course has allowed me to build a different standard of how to get to brilliant ideas by following a planned, structured process. Usually people think about a product and then start asking the target market if they do like it, what they would change or what are the main preferences. This is not the way to do it. We all need to follow a top down strategy, so it means that we need to choose the segment we want to target to develop different strategies or techniques to gain their insights, evaluate them and then create the perfect product or feature. Back in Spain, I was used to work more general issues like Strategic Marketing Plans for big companies, but I really liked Customer Insights because we were working very closely to these people, so we can learn from them with accurate information. 

 

My second topic or idea is Prototyping and developing a product according to the insights we found out. Before starting this class I had never tried to develop any kind of product. We usually thought about different options or different products but we never got to develop the real product. Prototyping and developing a product is not as simple as it seemed before starting the project. We needed to reflect as much insights as possible to fulfill potential customers’ needs. We knew who they were what they needed and where they wanted but we had no idea about what product could be the best option to meet those needs. This project helped me realize that prototyping is a process of iteration in which a high level of customer knowledge is required in order to come up an excellent idea.

 

I would like to focus the main part of my blog to talk about the project and my group. As you know I’m not American and before coming I wasn’t used to work with people from other countries, languages, cultures and ways of thinking. The first day I went to class and I realized that groups were assigned randomly; I was a little bit scared because I only knew the Spanish crew (Manu, David and Laura). However, my group welcomed me very well and we started working so hard on the project since the first meeting. I have had a really good experience working with them, because all of us had very different approaches, ways of thinking and ways of working but we all knew what the objective was, so we always were time efficient. All of our group meetings were meant to be as quick as possible with highest quality. I would also like to highlight that the instructor has given us the right direction in every moment. Only the fact that we had to do some updates based on a template every 2 or 3 weeks, was very useful because we were forced to think about our segment, their needs, insights or even the product, at least once a week. Finally, I want to highlight 2 more issues. The first one, as one classmate pointed out last week, it would be ideal during the project to know that we have to choose a segment and that we are assigned a room, but we shouldn’t know that we are meant to develop a product, because that could biased group’s focus. And last but not least, I’ve met some people in that class that are going to be friends for a long long time, so everything is positive and useful.

                                                                                             

Comment on David Valls’ Blog: Zara Fashion Chain

I decided to comment on this blog because it is a very well-known company for me, especially because I have done many projects about Zara’s business model back in Barcelona. I am sure that David will focus his project on the main points, but I want to help him on what I think could be improved.

I would like to start by highlighting how Inditex (parent company) describes Zara and its business model: Zara is a high fashion concept offering apparel, footwear and accessories for women, men and children. Zara offers a compelling blend of fashion, quality and price offered in attractive stores in prime locations on premier commercial streets and in upscale shopping centers. The in-house design and production capabilities enable us to offer fresh designs at our Zara stores twice a week throughout the year" (University of Oradea, Strategy and Sustainable competitive advantage: The case of Zara Fashion Chain, 2007).

Once we know how Zara works, I am able to compare it to David’s Blog. First of all, I would like to stress the fact that Zara tries to increase brand awareness through its stores design, instead of advertising the company in all media. David says in his blog that they gain Brand Awareness thanks to its prime location, but I would also say that store design and climate of scarcity is more important than prime locations. By climate of scarcity Zara means the feeling customers have when they go to the store and they know that the clothes they are seeing right now could be the last time they see them, because Zara changes its clothes every two weeks.

David did a very good research project to define the company and its processes. There’s not too much information to what he wrote in his blog, but I would change the main subject of the paper from Zara case to how Zara can enter the American apparel market.

 

It is pretty clear that Zara is performing very well and doing a really good job. But I would like to know why Zara is not that successful in the United States. As David said, Zara is present in several countries with an excellent performance, but United States. Maybe, that’s the element missing in his blog because he is defining Zara’s strategy but everything seems to be perfect. A good contrast would be to analyze how to enter successfully the saturated American market.

I spent an afternoon with David at Starbucks talking about Zara and here it is the result of our conversation. We found that America accounts for 29% of total apparel market and plays a key role in the global market. However, Zara is not performing well because it misunderstood what the American market wants. The main problem we found with Zara’s American strategy is that they decided to enter the market as a luxury brand instead of entering as a low-priced fashion chain (as they are in Europe). The problem arises when they continue the same business model: zero advertising policy, high inventory turnover and prime locations. American tastes are extremely different comparing to European tastes.

What I would do is to focus my paper on how to appeal American consumers in the apparel market. What Zara has to do to generate higher flows in its stores, what strategies Zara might follow to increase market share and brand awareness, describe its current pricing strategy and the best one Zara could use, etc. 

Guerrilla Marketing

During my paper I will define accurately every term, and I will try to show more examples of how to do guerrilla marketing. In this outline, I wanted to have a clear structure and develop a topic that could help marketers understand easily how it works.  

1.     Introduction

 a.      Trends in Marketing today

Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.

Marketing includes the name of your business, color, size, product, packaging, shape, advertising, salespeople, follow-up, web site, branding and a large etcetera. Marketing is the art of getting people to change their minds, so everything you do is going to affect people’s perceptions of your company. But marketing is not only prospects; it is also your current customers. A cornerstone of guerrilla marketing is customer follow up.

Marketing is also the truth made fascinating. You can help your customers, show them how to achieve their goals. Marketing is also a circle. It becomes a circle when you have the blessed patronage of repeat and referral customers. Moreover, marketing is more of a science every day as we learn new ways to measure and predict behavior, influence people, and test and quantify marketing.

Marketing is not only advertising. It has become a very powerful tool, but it has to be used in the right way, joining all the efforts and all the tools to meet your customers’ needs.

b.      What’s Guerrilla Marketing? 

Guerrilla Marketing is an easy and inexpensive strategy for making profits from your small business. A guerrilla marketer is a kind of business owner who seeks conventional goals, such as profits and joy, but achieves them using unconventional means. 

c.       The need for guerrilla marketing

If you are an entrepreneur, you need guerrilla marketing because the competition is smarter, more sophisticated, and even more aggressive than it was in the past. Guerrilla Marketing is effective and less costly. Marketing is the painfully slow process by which you move people from their place in the sun to their place on your customer list, gently taking a grasp of the inside of their minds and never letting go. Each component that helps you sell your product is part of the marketing process. The smaller the detail, the more important it is to a customer. But more important is to sell quality products. If you are selling quality, you are ready to practice guerrilla marketing. 

2.     Body

a.      Developing a Guerrilla Marketing Plan

Before you launch a marketing campaign, you need a core story: a real-life story about a problem involving the people to whom you are telling the story and how your solution to that problem can make life better for them. As a guerrilla your story can be more powerful because it can be more personalized. The most important part is to start with a plan, but also to be committed to that plan.

The main stage is to think about positioning: determining the specific niche that your offering is intended to fill. Anyway, your planning should be able to answer these questions: What business am I in? What is my goal? What benefits do I offer? What are my competitive advantages? What do I fear?

b.      Developing truly creative marketing

Guerrillas have only one definition of creativity in marketing: something that generates profit for their business. Creativity in marketing has everything to do with profitability and nothing to do with awards and compliments. The basic steps are as follows:

                                                               i.      Find the inherent drama within your offering

                                                             ii.      Translate the inherent drama into a meaningful benefit

                                                            iii.      State your benefits in as believable way as possible

                                                           iv.      Get people’s attention

                                                             v.      Motivate your audience to get involved

                                                           vi.      Be sure you are communicating clearle

                                                          vii.      Measure your results against your creative strategy

c.       E-marketing and Guerrillas

Before entering the world of online marketing, you need to know 2 things. The first is the size of e-commerce: Forrester Research predicted that online retailing will grow from $95.8 billion in 2003 to $229 billion in 2008. U.S. online consumers spent in excess of $632 billion outside of the Internet as a direct result of research they conducted on the Web.

The second thing you need to know at the outset is that the Internet is a direct-marketing weapon. The tactics and nuances of direct mail definitely continue to apply to Internet Marketing. Guerrillas succeed online because regardless of their background, they make it a point to learn the art and science of direct marketing, providing them with crucial insights about people.

Points to develop: begin with a product, create a Website and link your web.

d.      Examples of successful campaigns

Here is a link to a very interesting website where they explain and show some of the most amazing guerrilla marketing campaigns:

http://weburbanist.com/2008/08/27/15-amazing-dramatic-guerrilla-marketing-campaigns/ 

3.     Conclusion

a.      Guerrilla marketing in small companies

Guerrilla markets should take advantage from all the costless tools they have to promote their businesses. The use of guerrilla marketing allows a company to be more customized by using unconventional means. If you reach the objective of being customized, you can establish closer relationships between your company and your customer. It means having loyal customers instead of brand switchers.

Social Marketing is changing the rules: from technology to people

It is true that there are a series of words that have been introduced into our language during the last year; words such as prosumer, facebook, web 2.0, blogger, twitter or skype are current words that we usually use or work with. The problem is that we tend to link these words with technologies, blog platforms, nanoblogs, social networks; when we might relate them to people. We are facing a period in which we are changing attitudes, rules and behaviors where technologies can help, but only as a mean not as a goal.

These concepts are extremely important when we are talking about marketing especially when we try to the difference between e-Marketing and Social Marketing. The new marketing tool known as e-Marketing refers to the marketing strategies applied through Internet implying a relationship between a person and a specific technology. Traditional customer service processes, electronic commerce, on-line product catalogs, on-line advertisements, etc. they are all thought as managing an interaction between technology and user, but we no longer think about people sharing information. 

Social Marketing cares about the relationship between people. Technology is only a mean; currently most of brands are interested in conversations, they want to establish relationships between them and their customers to listen to them, to gather information, to detect trends, in other words, to find out what they want and how they want it. We are all surfing on Internet; giving our opinion in Forums, Chats or Blogs, recommending the products we tried or we plan to purchase and, creating at least an environment where we feel comfortable to give our expert opinion in the subjects we master. So technology, in the end, it doesn’t matter.

From now on, marketing departments might understand this change. They are not here to design and develop new environments or technology to serve the company; companies are here to encourage and drive relationships, to listen, talk and manage interactions between people.

Rules are changing and that causes a dramatic change in our life, because people are using the Internet to establish relationships. It can be drawn from the last elections in which politicians were trying to establish direct relationships with their voters to gain more votes or commitment. It is impossible to be connected with 1,000,000 at the same time. That enhances the value of people and team commitment.

Related to the same topic, we can talk about small and medium companies that are finding a new opportunity to gather information, listen to consumers and to ask them questions. It is important because consumers are on the Internet to compare opinions, to share knowledge and reduce their uncertainty and risk when purchasing products.

As Francis Pisani highlighted in his last book, “La Alquimia de las Multitudes (Spanish version)”. After the 2001 Boom of the Internet, users have continued using the Internet, and so people’s revolution came after the bourgeois revolution. Small and medium companies are not scared about consumer’s opinion because there’s no technology cost for the use of social media, so they can take advantage of this insignificant cost to compete against big companies.

Finally, there are some elements that can justify these structural changes that are allowing us to say that this sector is going to grow faster than other sectors. New business models are appearing to take advantage of these new tools and the ways to relate to people are evolving to networks and social media, so everything is pointing at the same direction: people and technology as a mean.

P.D: It has no connection to the topic I was treating but I want to show you these two ads, because I really liked them. They are about Blackberry and Apple. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVO8o_PKvVg

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ7iGjAC03I

 

Reptilian code & Lifestyle Brands

Clotaire Rapaille is a marketing expert and psychologist who tries to know how consumers make choices, but based on consumers’ unknown decision drivers; it means that he is able to decode behavioral information from unknown needs. As he says “My experience is that most of the time, people have no idea why they're doing what they're doing. They have no idea. So they're going to try to make up something that makes sense.”. They don’t know what they’re doing, so we need to investigate as much as possible what are these hidden drivers to market products as focused as possible.

For him is crucial to understand what he calls the Reptilian Hot Button. To do so, Rapaille has developed a 3-stage technique to find the consumers’ unconscious needs which drive consumption. These 3 stages are based on:

1. Past Reason: the reptilian inner core the most primitive, in other words, basic needs such as appetite, fear, lust, etc. People have different feelings for every single word, an unconscious code or mental highway. The first step is to ask the group about a single word, in this case it was the word “Luxury”. Rapaille thinks that people want to show how intelligent they really are in front of the group.
2. Through emotion (limbic brain): every word or every act has an emotion attached to it, so we need to know what these emotions are to market our products. Here starts the second step of the process. After having a break, the group is told to tell Rapaille a story, but the story has to be told to a 5 year old child from a different planet. At his point, consumers no longer try to be logical or seem intelligent; they only try to tell a story. The problem is that they get confused because they don’t what is intention of this step. Anyway, it evokes emotions that move them away from logical thinking. Rapaille sais that this step is very important because emotions drive you out from logical thinking. Then, the group has another long break, right before starting the last step.                                                                  

3. Primal core (the cortex: higher reason): at this phase to group enters the room where there aren’t chairs anymore, they only find pillows in the floor. Everyone is asked to sit down, relax and take notes about primal experiences (the first experience you had with this word). Rapaille thinks that people act based on primal needs and experiences, so he tries to put them in an estate of relaxation close to sleeping mode, to gather all this basic information.

Once we have done all the steps needed, Rapaille starts looking at all the steps to decode the consumption drivers to certain words. This code, enables a company to develop products or services totally focused on their target market, it also allows companies to save money because they are able to know what is marketable and how is marketable.

A very good example is the one that they explain during the video about the difference between selling cheese in France and USA. Usually in France and even in Europe we never put the cheese in the fridge because the cheese is alive. The problem of selling cheese in America is that Americans think that the cheese is dead, so the insight is totally different. Selling cheese in America is totally different to selling cheese in France. That’s why they decided to market the cheese wrapped with a hermetic plastic bag to put it in the fridge.   

Song Airlines is a new branch of Delta Airlines that was born as a low cost airline but trying to target a different market segment. Song decided to born as an out of the ordinary airline by offering organic products, low fares, entertainment, experiences, etc. It is a very good idea to penetrate such a saturated market this way, and the approach is very creative, but Song must know what really customers want and how much they want to pay for it. Song is trying to create a lifestyle brand but without enough money to maintain the initial strategy and without enough brightness to let the customer know that is an airline and not a travel agency or a fast food chain. I would like to stress that what they are doing is good but there are many companies performing better because they are more aggressive and focused on.

For example, I am from Spain, so I didn’t know most of the American airline companies when I first come here. In 2 months I’ve known a lot of companies, and one of them is JetBlue, but haven’t heard anything about Song, and I think I won’t hear anything about that company. Song is trying to target a market niche, but the problem is that this niche is now extremely limited to allow the company to live long.

I enjoyed Persuaders because it focuses on a different point of view of what consumers want and how to persuade them trying to gather information from their mind. I think this movie will be very useful for our career, because we will be able to find out more information when doing focus groups. 

T.C

Kenna's Dilemma

This post is about the chapter titled Kenna’s Dilemma from Malcom Gladwell’s book. After reading through the chapter, I found two main issues to take into account when marketing products and testing them.

The first lesson I found reasonably interesting is: “It’s exactly the same product, but a different set of sensations have been transferred from the bottle, which in this case is not necessarily a good thing.” (3. The blind leading the blind. Pg. 163). This fragment belongs to 7-Up case, when they added 15% yellow color to the bottle and people started thinking that it had a lot more lime or lemon.

When I think about this sentence, I realize that marketers can always play with consumer’s minds, trying to sell what they want to sell using hundreds of tactics. The implications for marketers in this case would be to understand what the consumer really values about the product and try to enhance it as much as possible to sell as much as possible.

There is a very famous case study in Catalunya directly related to transferring a different set of sensations thanks to marketing. Juve&Camps was a catalan champagne brand (champagne is called Cava in Catalunya) that was not performing very well in the mid 90’s because it was a low end product sold between 4$ to 6$. One day, the CEO woke up and decided to change totally his product. He wrote a letter calling to a meeting the 100 best sommeliers in Catalunya. Once they were all together Juve&Camps’ CEO proposed them to create the best Cava ever, all he needed was the sommeliers to work together in developing the best grape to come up with the best carbonated beverage.

Two years later they came up with the new product, new name (Juve&Camps) and a new story to tell when selling the product. At that moment, they needed to market the product. The strategy was so easy because the best 100 sommeliers in Catalunya would recommend their own product (we have to remember that they have developed the product). Then, people after tasting the product through a recommendation of a well-known sommelier, they will try to find the product in supermarkets or specialty stores. Juve&Camps decided not to market the product at the very first because supermarkets would be willing to give them more space because of the increasing demand. Finally, they started selling what is called a premium product focused on special celebrations and targeted to young to middle age people with a high-medium purchasing power. What is important to stress here is that the product itself was good, but what triggered sales was the story and the packaging of the product. Whenever you can tell a good story of a product, the product sells better because you are transferring a different set of sensations through colors, words and smells.

The second lesson I would like to stress is: “When you are in the product development world, you become immersed in your own stuff, and it’s hard to keep in mind the fact that consumers you go out and see spend very little time with your product. They know the experience of it then and there. But they don’t have any history with it, and it’s hard for them to imagine a future with it, especially if it’s something very different.” (pg 173).

Marketers should know before launching a breakthrough that consumers are not used to it, because thinking that they would understand without having any experience is a clear flop. Normally, when we develop a breakthrough, such as Aeron or the car that Ford developed before all other car manufacturers, we may know that consumers won’t be able to imagine a future with this product and here is where marketers have to play their role. It is said in marketing books that the first phase of the product life cycle has to focus on building links between the real product and similarities with consumers’ life. A very clear example of that is what AUDI did when they were starting to produce cars that used Quattro drive motion.

Last year in my Marketing Strategy class back in Spain we analized all AUDI advertisings. We realized that the first advertisements were totally focused on promoting this new feature called Quattro, but they were promoting it always using comparisons. I post an advertisement where you can appreciate how they did it (it is on spanish, but you can see it graphically). What I want to show with this lesson is that consumers need to link the product with something known, because if we don’t do it like this we’d face rejection at the first stages of the product selling process.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT_actZK8bc

Finally, I would like to conclude my post with a summarizing reflection. When we are marketing products we must have developed a story behind the product so as to be able to gain customer’s insights. As we are developing unknown products we have to have links between the product and consumer’s life and as we are developing known products but using different approaches, we must  have developed stories and strategies to let them know that the product can satisfy their needs in a different way.

GUERRILLA MARKETING

All my life I’ve been dreaming about becoming a young entrepreneur, to run my own business and take strategic decisions to make my company as much profitable as possible. I know that running my own small business, means having limited budgets to decide what to do in every single moment, so I’m always looking for information about how to be successful running your own small business. For example, one of my worries is how can you market your products successfully without spending a large amount of money.

A few years ago, I read an article written by Jay Conrad Levinson that showed what’s called GUERRILLA MARKETING: easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits from your small business. The article was called GUERRILLAS IN THE REAL WORLD (you can find it here: http://www.gmarketing.com/articles/read/3/Guerrillas_in_the_Real_World.html ).

After reading this article, I decided to start reading more articles about Guerrilla Marketing, and finally I bought Jay Conrad Levinson’s book called Guerrilla Marketing to study in depth how it works and what to do to be a good marketer in a Guerrilla Marketing point of view.

Nowadays, I’m not running my own business but I hope I’ll be able to do it in a few years, so I want to develop my topic on how to market products using GUERRILLA MARKETING STRATEGIES.

My main goal with this topic is to develop all my ideas about how to appeal people by using alternative marketing tools. New generations are immunized against TV, radio or newspaper marketing campaigns, so we need to take different roads, use different tools and convince these generations by using other techniques. To inform our segments about what we’re doing we have to use different tools totally focused on showing how the product works, attracting their attention by becoming eye-catching. Moreover, it isn’t worth to spend hundreds of millions developing huge marketing campaigns because what we want is to appeal our specific target, show them our skills and capabilities, and of course hear from them to customize our products/services as much as we can to maximize profits by minimizing marketing expenses.

What’s interesting for me is how a small business can be more successful than a big company by using Guerrilla Marketing as its main marketing tool. I also have a few questions about this marketing tool. Is it efficient and effective? Should we use latest technologies to be successful? Are small businesses able to afford these latest technologies? Do we have any example? How can we create a good guerrilla marketing campaign? What should we know about our customers to implement these kinds of strategies? Etc.

We can relate this topic to Customer Insights because it’s clear that we need to know perfectly what kind of people are buying our product, what they expect and what their insights are. I’ll try to develop all my questions by using different sources of information and adding real case studies to clarify as much as possible how can you succeed.