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.