Marketing

12 articles

All I certainly know is that I know nothing at all

10 minutes read

It was a girl night out in town and it was coming to an end in a club full of people, loud music and shouting. Two of us were heading home in the same direction and we wanted to call a cab, but it was almost impossible to make a call with that noise around us. Other group of friends tried to text the cab service through Viber, which seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t want to go with that cab service. I have “my” cab service and I like to use it because I want to pay 5% more to drive a nice car with air conditioning and cab driver not smoking (yeah, that’s still an issue in my country believe it or not).
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Brains that like to jump the rope

3 minutes read

If by any chance you are a fan of Mad Men TV series that features the lives of bad ass marketing and advertising Madison Avenue Gods Don Draper and his agency crew, you probably remember that not always did Draper win a pitch. One of those ones that they lost was with Heinz when Draper proposed them a campaign which shows no product at all. Yes, you heard it all good: NO PRODUCT AT ALL.

Paid to mislead

5 minutes read

Yesterday I watched a cooking TV show in which the host was trying really hard to make a pie dough with a food processor. It was crumbing. It was squeaking, it was trembling, I thought it would explode at the end. But noooo, he was so eager to use that stupid machine that it was quite clear: someone paid the show producers big money to make a fool out of the chef. At that moment I was completely sure that I will never ever buy any home appliance produced by that company. However, I am quite sure that marketing department of this brand was so happy because they got 5 minutes of close shot of their branded appliance on national TV. GRPs were jumping, people were watching, but the truth behind the success of this product placement is completely different from ratings.

One diabetes and two hair losses please

4 minutes read

I went to a drugstore yesterday to buy some hair products and I was standing in front of the shelf with a stack of thousand different products. Yep, we’ve discussed this horror in my previous post, but this time, I had another mindf**k project being delivered to my poor over-thinking brain: product labeling.

Me, myself and I

5 minutes read

Few weeks ago, I was attending a conference about digital media and there was a discussion about “selfie phenomenon”. One of the speakers said that concerts are not that important anymore, what is important is that “I AM AT THE CONCERT”. That is why we record and share. We want to blow a whistle: Hey, I was at the concert man, gimme LIKE, gimme FAVORITE, Retweet man!

Meeting my BRAIN HERO

3 minutes read

I guess all of us had childhood heroes: Superman, Luke Skywalker, Sherlock Holmes, Cinderella…
But who are your adult heroes? Do you have any at all?
I do. And I met mine yesterday.
Years ago when I was writing my final master thesis I bought a book from amazon “Neuromarketing – understanding the buy buttons in your customer’s brain”.  I had no idea who the authors were. I couldn’t drop the book before I read it and I sucked up all the ideas. In the morning, I got up and said “this is what I want to do with my life”. That was 5 years ago. I still live up to my dream reading and blogging about that amazing field of new age science.

Mook and Midriff: The reason why you just don’t get the obnoxious teens

4 minutes read

Yesterday evening, I stopped at a local shop to buy some stuff and I was standing in the queue for the cash register. Two teen girls were in front of me, buying some energy drinks, listening some strange music on their smartphones, singing out loud and sighing “Gee, what a pain in the ass, this queue is so slow, lady can you hurry up?!”, they shouted at the lady working at the register. I rolled my eyes and turned around. A guy behind me, about 30 years old shouted at them “Hey chicks, behave yourselves or you can leave the shop”. They turned around blinking and playing with their hair, almost killed him with their eyes .

The toys we buy

5 minutes read

If you are by any coincidence born around 1983, we are the same age and we can try a little experiment:
Remember the time when we were in the 3rd grade of elementary school. That puts us in year 1993. Try to remember the things that you asked your mother or father to buy you because you really wanted it. Does maybe a thing like this come up in your memory?

Liar liar

3 minutes read

So you think you know what you like? Hm. Think twice.
The real nightmare of a marketing department starts the moment when the campaign is ready to set off. Before the launch, experienced and not so brave marketing gurus turn to conventional methods of gathering people’s opinions about the prepared campaign. Will they love it? Will they buy more beer if we sweat that glass off and make that girls cleevage sexier? Will they hate it? The questions are endless.
Some companies do a brief survey, some of them just sit around for hours and discuss the possible opinions and others turn to focus groups. Aha! Focus group, that is a great idea! (?) Let’s hear it from our future customers, let’s see what they say about it!

Marketing ninjas’ little secret: 90 minutes ads

4 minutes read

Let’s do a quick quiz:
What computer Carry Bradshaw uses to write her column?
What shoes is she obsessed with?
What car James Bond drives in Casino Royal?
What car Mulder and Scully drive in X files?
What store chain sales are Will, Grace, Jack and Karen and all Manhattan characters are obsessed with?

So WHAT do we buy and are we that stupid or are we just giving it a shot?

3 minutes read

Many marketing courses and books are in focus of purchasing habits: how, when and why do people buy certain products and not others.  Some would settle down for a “brand lovemark” answer: people buy certain brands because they have trust in them, they buy some of the lifestyle that the brand is selling, some promise a better life, better looks, better health, better social status. Others say that consumers have a certain pattern in their decision making process and that consumers will buy whatever promises them better life. True. We all buy to raise our Quality of Life. That is the only reason.

Is marketing wasting your money? The saga of buying aluminum foil roll.

3 minutes read

Couple of days ago, I went to a large store to buy some groceries and other home stuff with my mom. We had a shopping list and I was hoping to finish the retail saga in about 15 minutes, but then, we stopped to buy aluminum foil for food storing. The shelf with aluminum foils had about 20 different products, about 5 different brands:  they were all the same, except that they had different length of foil roll and different price. It’s easy to find the cheapest, but hey, guess what, the cheapest is the shortest roll.  “This one is too short, it will go out in a week”, said my mom. Ok, take the longer one-right? There are 5 different brands of longer one, with significant difference in price. “This one?”, I took the cheapest 20m roll. “No, look, for a few bucks more, we can get 30 m roll”, my mom said. I took that one and put it in a cart. Just when I thought we’ve completed the mission of buying such a trivial thing, I saw cheaper 30m roll. I switched it and pushed the cart on, but hey, imagine that, for just a few bucks more, there was 40m foil. We lost patience, and we just took the last foil on the shelf. It was the longest and I think the most expensive one.  Product placement tip: just put your foil at the end of the shelf and your sales will rise just for the sake of shortage in human patience.