Viral Campaign

I was doing some research for my Public Relations course when I stumbled upon this viral video that OfficeMax was using to generate some hype about there back to school sales. The video features a man buying art from an art dealer but when he goes to pay the man he only has pennies. The premise of the video is that OfficeMax has lots of supplies for sale for 1 cent, and although this guy doesn't accept pennies, OfficeMax does.

Here's the clip...



I think this is an incredibly clever way of getting a viral campaign started. The 'penny pranks' as they are called on YouTube have thousands of hits each, and are a smart, funny way to market your product. I think these ads are a great example of what viral campaign is all about.

Guerrilla marketing campaign

After talking about guerrilla marketing in class last week, our group figured it would be cool to try and research some of the more creative innovative forms of the technique to get an idea of what we wanted to use for our product. One of the coolest ones that I found was done by the website half.com. Their idea was to pay the small 360 person town of Halfway, Oregon 100,000 dollars if they agreed to change their town name to half.com for a year. Well, the plan worked because within days the website was on the Today Show, was covered in The Wall Street Journal, and the stunt was called "one of the greatest publicity coups in history," by Time Magazine.

In my opinion this is one of the coolest marketing ideas I've heard of. It's fast, easy and generated a good amount of hype about the website, and what more could you ask for in a guerrilla marketing campaign.

The site, Half.com is now owned by Ebay, so the owners did just fine for themselves... http://www.half.ebay.com/

Another Product Placement

I was taking a break from wrapping up a paper I have to turn in tomorrow, and I figured I'd sit back and watch a movie. This time the choice was Transformers. As I was sitting there watching I noticed how ridiculous the product placement is throughout this entire movie. The more you notice it, the more annoying it gets. Lets start first with the robots, they are all GM cars, and they take every opportunity to show you why they are such great, cool cars. Then later on in the movie when they are in the epic final battle the director/producer or whoever is in charge of product placement decided to have an Escalade (another GM vehicle) as well as a mountain dew vending machine and an Xbox 360 turn into robots. It was some of the most blatant and obvious product placement I have ever seen, and it honestly ruined that portion of the movie.

Heres the Mountain Dew vending machine before...



And here it is in its full glory, launching pop cans at some poor woman.

Pricing Plan

Skimming the market is a term used to describe a product that is originally priced very high but then after it has been on the market for a while the cost comes back down to a more reasonable cost. There are tons of products that do this on a regular basis, some more so than others. Here are a few that come to mind when I think about it. The sony PS3 was originally 499 dollars but is now down to 299, the ipad is currently selling at a very high price, but once the novelty wears off it will drop, xbox360, the new Panasonic 3d TV and many other things are all guilty of price skimming. It is a smart strategy because it forces people to pay more for something they really want and will fork out for. I feel like it only works for more expensive products because skimming a cheap one simply won't make a difference.

Here's a picture of the new Panasonic 3D TV, which is currently skimming the market.

The Proposal - Product Placement

Its kind of hard to tell, but it is a Starbucks cup!

I was sitting down for a lovely evening with the fellas and we figured we would get in touch with our feminine sides and watch the Proposal starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. In one of the opening scenes Sandra Bullock has to fire one of her employees and while doing so she is holding a Starbucks cup waving it in the face of the camera. It is a blatant product placement because the cup is obviously empty or it would've been spilling all over the place. While watching it all I could look at was the cup and wasnt looking at the movie. It was cool to see product placement firsthand.

Managing Products

Managing a product line is crucial part of the marketing process because it enables companies to establish marketing plans, change them, mediate the amount of money being spent and analyze the effectiveness of a plan. It is easy for us as consumers to just sit back and see things as they come but in all reality a lot of work goes into each commercial we see or each marketing strategy we notice. There are many different types of branding like retro branding, national branding, private-label brands, generic brands and many others. One of the first steps in the marketing strategy and management processes is determining which type of branding a product falls under. One of the best marketing schemes right now in my opinion is the new Old Spice commercials. They have determined what type of branding they are, which is a national brand, that appeals to all males in the country. Because of this realization they then made their commercials, packaging and product all appeal to the average male. The following commercial outlines their new line of deodorants...



This commercial explains a new set of scents that appeals to the 'real men' in America, and I think it does an effective job of capturing our attention and showing an entertaining ad.

Creating a Product Line

A product line is when producers expand upon one individual product and release different products that compliment it or compete with it. This gives companies the possibility to dominate a market and control a market segment. When we look at different products today almost every company has come out with some sort of product line. In class we talked about Pyramid Brewery releasing a different line of beers with similar advertisement and packaging as well as Old spice releasing a wide array of different deodorants.

One example i can think of that truly represents the importance of a product line is something that most car companies do. They offer a a product line of cars, featuring trucks, suv's, coupes, and hybrids, different but similar products that help them gain a portion of the market. As these products reach there maturity peak they will see their highest number of sales and as they begin to decline the companies will develop a new design and new features for their next set of products.