exploring and creating discussion about the ins and outs of how and why e-marketing is adding value to our lives and the impacts on companies and their consumers
Another semester down, and it has come to everyone's favourite time of the year...exams! I cannot believe how fast this semester has gone, from our first lecture featuring the infamous drippy drinking bird, to hearing about Wag's Geocation adventures, to learning the sneaky unethical tactics of e-marketers, MKF 3881 has been both fun and very practical.
It is overwhelming how many resources are now available for marketers to take advantage of (and the list is growing), and shows how important it is to stay ahead of all the new technologies. As has been a theme throughout my blog posts, it is by using these resources and tools differently to competitors which will get your brand noticed, and your consumers engaged. There is no excuse to not exploring new marketing tactics as there is so much information out there, all you have to do is look for it!
Thanks to Wags for making the lectures worth waking up for :)
A new campaign by Lynx and their new creative agency 'Droga5' capitalises on the theory that the world will end in 2012. For this blogs purpose, I went to sus out the campaign at http://www.lynxfastlife.com/. The only click-able button was a big blue connect to facebook page which came up with the 'Lynx 2012' facebook application which asked if it could use my fb info and photos. I was a bit weary, especially as I am clearly not the target market, but decided to do it anyway. This is one of the screen shots of my personalised video...clearly directed towards young males, as much as i'd love my life's last moments to consist of girls who can't even spell symbol holding up signs about how awesome I am.
In all seriousness, I think this is a good use of personalised e-marketing and social media, driven by other traditional media. I think Lynx understands their target market and is not afraid to take risks which has contributed to the high brand loyalty of their consumers over the years.
You would think a third year marketing student like myself would be fully aware to the behind the scenes of the marketing world and attempt to avoid all see-through marketing activities. However, this is not the case at all. I am simply a marketer's dream. I unconsciously switch from a marketer to a consumer in seconds, ready to buy something just to get the freebie, spend more to get the discount, enter the competition i know i won't win, and sign up to every VIP mailing list. After our lecture on spam last week, it clicked when i realised how many daily emails i was recieving. Even though i willingly gave my details to these companies, i still felt like i was being spammed. I decided to unsubscribe from the ones which were not giving me any value (some obviously breaching the unsubscribe functionality which i now have negative feelings towards their brands). My favourite one isDECJUBA as they inform me of their sales in a brief, relevant message and are not predictable in when they send these messages. They make me feel like a VIP, not just a target for their selling objective.
I thinkthere is a fine line between keeping your brand in consumers minds and just annoying themuntil they one by one unsubscribe from your emails. Regular direct emails are more personal than social media, and generally annoy people more, than say a status from a group they liked on facebook, when they are not relevant. Consumers give marketers their details with an implied psychological contract that they don't abuse the privilige. If messages contain no value to the consumer, they should not have been sent at all. There is a high risk of negative brand associations if marketers are not respectful to the people on their mailing lists.
Are there any brands which you once loved, signing up to their mailing lists, which have abused your trust by sending you junk without value?How did it make you feel towards the brand?
6 blogs down...4 to go... So I'm sure many of you went to the Monash Marketing Students Society (MMSS) marketing ball a couple of weeks ago and if you didn't you should be ashamed of yourselves!. It was an amazing evening (of what i remember) and I have the privilege of being close friends with the star who organised the whole thing, Steph Gallagher, Well done Stephanie :) So to get to my e-marketing issue...on the night the Monash Photography Club was taking photos which you could purchase, I posed like an idiot for them then got distracted by an awesomely good song and the enticement of the dfloor, forgetting to go back until the next morning when I was feeling just a bit seedy. Tonight I was excited when I saw someone had posted their ball photos on fb :) I went and found some of me, some good...some not so good. I ruined an entire photo by being the only one in it who closed my eyes (Im the giant in the black dress)! So the moral of the blog is if the internet did not exist, I would have probably forgotten about the photos once again and they would have lost business to a drunk, distracted customer. Because of their online presence and e-commerce, this customer has been regained :) I also like how they are using social networks to promote the club, by allowing you to share your photos on fb and twitter! feel free to share stories and photos from your night if you went :) or any general comments would be lovely!
As wags delightfully pointed out to us this morning, we have 2 weeks left to complete our 10 blogposts. At the beginning of the semester, my naive self did not realise how intense and time consuming keeping up a blog could be. Finding the time to stop, and really think about something that I thought was worth sharing has been harder then I thought. At the start, every time I went to write a blog i would try to perfect the blogpost, editing it multiple times. Now my posts are shorter and sharper and these are the ones that have engaged more people. Writing a blog has also made me more aware in general, always looking for my next post. So in conclusion, I am actually really appreciative that i was forced to blog! Expressing my opinion has been hard enough, imagine having to express brand values through a blog and having to be fully accountable, hopefully that will be my next challenge!
I was shown this is my International Retailing lecture last week. I thought this was so cool and really logical. Tesco thought outside the box, using new technologies to capture a major opportunity. This opportunity was busy Koreans who had to wait for trains, this wasted time became a time they could do their grocery shopping, just like in a real store, but using their phones to scan the bar-code. Their groceries would be delivered when they got home. This is definitely a win-win situation for the consumer and Tesco!
In that lecture on retail technology, one of the key messages was that technology should be used to solve problems of the business and have a purpose/objective behind it. Using new technologies just because everyone else is will not get any business very far, you have to be creative in HOW you use technologies available in order to add value to your business and consumers, just like Tesco has! What are your thoughts?
I think I have done enough talking in my other blogs so I thought I would show you guys this interesting video about integrative digital signage in retail and see what you think? Do you think it would enhance your shopping experience? There is also talk due to the expense of these technologies that in the future you may have to pay to enter a store? Would you be willing to pay for the extra value of the shopping experience?
Status updates about the latest news, check ins at our favourite cafes and random photos of people sleeping on trains flood into our news feeds every minute of the day. Why do we feel the need to share life's little moments with hundreds of our "friends"?
Because we can.
Mobile technology has made sharing in each others lives a part of our everyday activities. There is no such thing as "you had to be there" anymore. Everyone is everywhere, involved in each others lives, whether they want to be or not.
For marketers this is an extremely sharp double edged sword.
CONSUMER 2 CONSUMER
Consumers love to share. Back in dark ages, before mobile technology, the communication of a brand experience would usually only be shared well after the event happens, allowing the emotional intensity of the experience to subside. It would also have only been shared with a couple of people instead of a couple of hundred. Because of this, unsatisfied consumers who voice their bad experience at the time it happens can damage a brands reputation on a larger scale then offline word of mouth. However, positive experiences of a brand are extremely powerful word of mouth on the mobile medium.
As mentioned in our lecture, some brands have taken it upon themselves to respond to these brand outbursts. Do you think responding to each of these complaints individually is efficient and good for brand equity or just a waste of time?
MARKETER 2 CONSUMER
The mobile medium is being experimented with by many industries. One industry which has adapted this technology in their marketing strategy is the Cinema industry. Village was the first company to use the mobile ticketing system using a bar-code sent to the phone. I tried to use this a couple of weeks ago and could not get it to work,has anyone used it successfully?
Village's direct competitor Hoyt's has taken advantage of proximity marketing with their 'bluezone' area allowing consumers to access content via bluetooth when in the bluezone area. Has anyone ever recieved content from the bluezone? was it effective?
According to Alexa, an online rating of the most visited sites (http://www.alexa.com/topsites), Google indeed does run the world, or at least the online world anyway, as much as Beyonce would hate to admit. Wherever there are people hungry for information, Google is always there, a trusted name to guide us through the vast amount of useless stuff which exists out there on the cloud, towards the answers to our problems.
'Google it' has become ingrained in the vocab of ‘digital natives’ and is the best answer to the worlds hardest questions. Google gives us hope, allowing even the dumbest people to look smart at the click of a button. For map reading illiterate people like myself, Google allows me to pretend I know where the f I am, when in reality I am in fact very, very lost.
On reflection of my web use, Google is always the beginning of anything I do on the internet. Even when the URL is already in my history; I automatically search the site in Google first. Google lets us be lazy and that is why we love it. If Google disappeared I would be dumb and extremely lost, would you miss google if it one day disappeared?
This success of the reliance of consumers on Google has seemingly become the perfect platform for e-marketers to tap into. However, just by being on google does not ensure success. Advertising on Google has little credibility as Wags and the rest of MKF3381 discovered with the ineffective 'different' Monash ad. And just because you are on the top of a google search does that mean people will care about what you have to say if it is not relevant to them?
I think that Google, although sounding like a no-fail strategy can not be a strategy in itself. It is extremely important for e-marketers to spend time evaluating and researching how to creatively use e-marketing tools (such as google) to increase overall value for the consumer. It is not the tool that will increase your sales, but the way in which you use the tool which really matters. Digital marketing, although an unavoidable huge craze, needs to have purpose and be supported by an integrated marketing campaign ( thankyou MKF3461) in order to add any value to the brand.
Being an emerging marketer I think that the fact that everyone else is doing it, is the best reason why you shouldn’t. If you do not have the resources to compete with other large businesses on google, there are many other low-cost (or even free) digital tools which can be just as effective if used appropriately. So in this case, Google doesn't always have the answer. I'm sure Beyonce would agree with me on that. What do you think?
Melbourne has been price tagged as one of the most expensive cities in the world, and international retailers are taking advantage of our misfortune through the all accessible tool of e-commerce. With the aussie dollar reaching an all time high of $1.10 to every US dollar, the temptation to purchase everyday items online is high. For the tech savvy and knowledgeable consumers of today, online shopping has no restrictions. The ‘shop’ is open all day everyday and there are no annoying salespeople to deal with, the only thing stopping you from buying everything your mouse rolls over, is your not so supportive bank account.
aSOS, a clothing and accessories phenomenon has become the new ‘fashion capital’, and with no postage fees, it is not hard to start receiving multiple packages per week with a simple click of a button. Many people have become addicted to this new style of shopping, constantly checking such sites as aSOS multiple times per day.
I would not be surprised if online shopping soon becomes the most popular activity online, passing both social media and pornography. However, the exact reason to the rise in e-commerce over traditional shopping is questionable.Is it simply the lower prices which draw us into ‘e-tailing’ or the convenient and independent nature of purchasing through the computer?
Why do you or don't you shop online? What products would you or would you not purchase online?
