FINAL BLOG

By the end of the course there are so much things we have learnt about the market and, specially the consumers mind, that is quite difficult to point out the most important ones that will remain on my mind after that course at all. However, what is true is that thanks to the group projects we have been able to put in practice some of the theories already done in class.

One of the concepts I liked and I think I better learned thanks to that course is the customer value. Every consumer have different values around one same product, values that marketers need to find out so as to fit in them and get to the consumers real needs. Working in the group projects, our group realized that our segment had some different values than other segments which had to be taken into account if we wanted to get into them. For example, as teenagers that they are, the amount of money they receive is not really high. That implied that the value of the money was really significant for them and made us think about making a low price product targeted specifically to that segment with low income.

Another skill we have learned thanks to that project is how to gain insights from the consumers. Eventhough in theory some techniques seem to be the best for a kind of segment, once those techniques are put in practice we realized that sometimes the least expected ones are the most effective to gain insights from our segment. For instance, before starting to use the techniques so to find out our customer insights, we thought that the best way to get it was asking directly to the target itself. However, our customer was too shy and immature to answer some of the questions correctly and carefully as well as we found out that were the mothers normally the Target consumer we have to look for as they were normally the ones that bought the products for their “kids”. As a result, in our case we could extract more information from second parts better than the segment we were targeting the supposed product.


Finally, when talking about the team project, I feel I have learned more thanks to the team. Actually, what we did was putting all the stuff that happened throw our minds in common so our ideas brainstorming was hugh and we could take advantage of it. Actually, four people usually think more and better than just one. In our case was completely true, as we could create synergies among us so the parts that just one couldn’t cover or just didn’t think about it, was the issue of the other and so on. What it was also good is the idea of being able to discuss every point in team. Arguing about the same idea at the same time made us think about many other different options at the time to work and to find out a good solution for our project. Every idea was accepted and discussed so different points of view were considered at a time that each one could learned from each other. In that case, having and working in a group improve the final result as well as having someone that can help us anytime we need external help, and I’m talking about the teacher role.
In conclusion, while we could be followed externally while working, our group internally was also improved thanks to every member that componed it at a time that every person in the group also followed internally the rest and helped each other.

Whether or which

 Seth’s Goddin Blog talk about two different ways of doing marketing. Those ways  described as wheter or not someone should buy one product or on which one they should buy once they realize a need.What is the real difference of those two marketing achievements? What are the possible consequences in the marketing? How marketers can decide whether to use one technique or another?

 What my limited knowledge in marketing can tell me about that issue is that there are real differences between those techniques and they should be used properly depending on such many factors, most of them englobed in the product life cycle.

  ·         In the first case,  when entering in a new market it’s absolutely necessary to get to know to the consumers your product  and try to persuade them to buy it. Actually, there was no market for that product so the objective is to create a market and then try to make it bigger. Your product cannot be compared to any other else because there’s no competition or it’s barely noticed by the consumers. Obviusly those types of campaigns are usually the most expensive ones because as there was no market before you first have to start to let the consumer know about the product tangibles before talking about your own product. This is normally what the most significant companies do: they open markets, invest lots of money in there and then get the first mover advantage (or try to).

 ·         In the other case we are talking about trying to compete in a market that is already opened and in which there’s already some companies that have invested in tangible  characteristics of the product.  Is in that case, when the product lifecycle is starting being mature, when companies can  take the liberty to  go directly to show intangible characteristics of their product and even be compared with other products of the competition. This is the case of some companies that don’t have money enough to open markets for themselves so they take advantage of the big ones and, in most cases, this may end in a healthy competition that helps to make the market grow.

 

From my point of view, deciding whether to do the “wheter” or the “which” is not just  the whim of the company but  the market type , the moment of the product lifecycle that is in and the money the company can afford  in  promoting that product . 

Consuming across cultures

 

1.       Introduction

a.       Thesis

How culture, geography and background can affect consumption?

What affects our behavior

·         Character:  genetics,

·         Environment:  culture, background, geography, society,

Unpredictable behaviors versus predictable behaviors

 

b.      Outline

·     Cultural / Environmental divergences across the world.

·     Consumer convergences across the world.

·     Focusing on two different cultures

·     How to use this information in a marketing view 

 

2.       Body 

a.       Cultural / Environmental divergences across the world.

Basic threats about the main cultures that exist in the world:

·         Asian

·         European

·         North-American

·         Latin

 

b.        Consumer convergences across the world.

The effects of the globalization and the new changing trends among cultures

 

c.         Focusing on two different cultures

·         North-American Culture

·         European Culture

Common day in a European and American Family.  Convergent and divergent threats.  Real examples

How is the environment structured according to those cultures and values.

  

d.        How to use this information in a marketing view

·   The answer of the companies: How do marketing companies deal with those facts? Different ways they sell the same product

·         Succesful cases

·         Failed  Cases

  

3.       Conclusion 

a.       Summarizing the key facts

b.      Learnings from the study

c.       Applications to customer insights

1.         How to use this information in a marketing view

The New advertising era

How many times do you have zapping when  watching TV?  Do you remember the last advertising campaign that you saw in a billboard?   Even though these questions should be quotidian for us, the reality shows that the answers probably wouldn’t be what we expected and are getting  every time more surprising.   Customers are no more sensitive about what they watch in TV or see in the street.

The Actual advertising saturation which all the media are submitted to without exception, leads the advertiser to search for new ways to make the message get to the target audience. The companies are investing their budgets in new advertising formats far from conventionalism.   In this marketing metamorphosis we have to look for other solutions so as to get consumer’s attention.  These following  techniques  are some examples of the new trends in advertising:

·         Viral marketing:  is defined as a group of techniques that try to take advantage of the pre-existing social nets in order to increase the knowledge of the brand. It is a new version that has achieved surprising effects without big investments or hiring mass medias.  MySpace.com and Facebook are some of the most famous networks in which announcers can easily know the consumer profile so as to send him/her the proper  advertising

·         Product placement: As the  traditional advertising are not sensitive to customers any more, new advertisings are directly put in television series and movies, entering directly in the character’s  lives  and getting into customers minds. An excellent example of that type of marketing would be Starbucks coffee, well known for being the place in which Sex in the City starring and many other celebrities usually have a coffee during the movie.

·         Trade marketing: can be defined as the marketing made in the point of sales, what is normally stores or   supermarkets.  It puts emphasis in strong marketing and promotional campaigns  once the customer has already came in the store  and it’s getting every time more importance since the customers are deciding everytime more what to buy once they are in the store.

 

Since traditional marketing is no sensitive to us anymore, new different trends and techniques are being taken by marketers so as to get the desired effect in us.  What would be the next advertising generation?

The primary code

In a world everyday more competitive and   packed of ads, marketers have to play hard to capture consumer’s attention in many different ways so as to make them buy their products.  In such environment in which  consumers have to decide among thousands of products in the market, one of the marketers task  is to find out why consumers decide one or another product among such a huge supply and what is the really cause of buying it and not another. Certainly,  this is one of the current points of Dr. Rapaille lately research.

Dr  Rapaille, a well known market researcher, developed a theory that conducted him to  break in to the psyche of the  consumers. The basis of that research is the theory that humans have unconscious and deeply associations for all products existing in our lives so that every single word has a mental connection in our minds, what he calls a “code”.  In order to find out the code of some markets, Rapaille developed a 3-stage technique described as the following:

·         The past reason

The  research starts with the outer realms of the brain  so that it makes  the attendants  feel comfortable with the situation,  get confident and feel intelligent as it’s easy to talk about.  However, what they are actually saying in that stage it’s not further relevant for the research than making them feeling comfortable and make them prepared for next steps.

·         The true emotions

Next stage consists on going further and entering to the emotions world, the real emotions that consumers experience when they buy products. The logic stops playing any role in that step so that emotions can flow showing off what is behind any supposed logical behavior.

·         The primal core

The last stage  goes directly to the insight of those emotions, our primal  instincs, that is what really make us feel and then behave.  When people stop reasoning and go throughout their emotions, the last realm in the brain is the subconscious, what is the real thing that is in our insight for every single word in this world.

Finally, the result of the research is the code for a specific market, a code that will have to be followed by marketers if they want to connect with consumers and, at the end, make them buy their products.  An example of Rappaile findings could be the difference to sell cheese to French or Americans. For French people, the cheese is alive and that is why they don’t put it in the fridge. In the other hand, for Americans cheese is dead. You can’t approach to both consumers the same way and that’s why they have to wrap up in plastic something not imaginable for French consumers.

 

When talking about one specific case, song Airlines, it is possible to figure out why it did succeed or why it didn’t.  At my point of view, the company went too much throw the emotions and subconscious at a time that people were not still prepared. Even though the insight code might be right, to get to people instincts, as well as the research done by Rapaille, a company has to go throw the 3 stages. In other case, people gets confused, don’t really know what’s going on and despite of the effort of the company, the product becomes a failure.   

At the end, our instincs are what make us move in that world and the actions made in that world will  make us feel  in one  way or another. However, as humans that we are what make us different from any other animal in the world is the reason. Humans will always think they have strong reasons for any of their actions, so the marketers task will be to find out what really is in our insights despite the reason.

KENNA'S DILEMMA

People’s insight is difficult to understand and has been studied by many different ways, as understanding people feelings and interests seems to be the key to any success in that world. After reading kenna’s dilemma, what I’ve found is just lots of more examples in which people amaze and surprise by behaving in a way that others would never expect.


One of the most important lesson and one of the most substantial things that make people differ from any other animal in the world is that we are unpredictable. As individuals that reason, we have the power to change our mind in any moment as well as hide what are our real feelings about a concrete subject. People’s minds are so complex that even ourselves sometimes have problems to understand what are our real feelings or why we are behaving in that specific way.
To put an example, a recent study made by a Supermarket chain in Spain showed that 80% people that go to the supermarket have an specific list of what they want to buy when they get there. However, the study also revealed that about 90% of that people that had a closed list, changed their list and bought some other stuff once they got there. Why could it happen? People is supposed to be rational, and tend to order their life, but there’s so many factors affecting our decisions in any single moment that one little change in that environment can make us change our mind. And that is the big key for marketers, to deal with that environment, to persuade new and current customers to their products by moving as much factors as they are able in our atmosphere.

Another good lesson that I’ve learned by working in a company is that Marketers are usually biased by such many things in their surroundings that they cannot be threated as normal consumers.
As it’s the most easy research they can do, marketers tend to attribute their own characteristics to the market. However, that generally produces fatal mistakes in marketing. On the one hand, because we cannot project at all people’s thinkings and feelings since every single people is different from each other. And on the other hand and even more important, because generally marketers are even more biased than any other person. They know more information about the market than normal consumers and usually perceive much more things and details that are usually irrelevants for another single person. They are so used to their work and have experienced so much that several times what they predict by projection is a thousand miles far away from what a normal consumer would do in a normal way.

Then, as marketers we are going to be, how can we deal with that issue?
From avoiding projecting any of our feelings in our research, we need to pay attention in what our consumers are saying and not only in what they are really saying, which is less important, but in what they really wanted to say, what is, their expressions, their movements, their attitudes, their behavior, and so on. Normally, the key consist on not what they’re saying but what they’re keeping quiet.

“ The only normal people in the world, are the people we don’t know”

Consuming across cultures

Consumer's mind is a field in which any good marketer would like to get in.

Human behaviour is amazing in the way that is generally unpredictable and unexpected. However, sociologyst, phsycologist, anthropologyst and now more than ever marketers spend their life making exhausted researchs so as to understand human's being.

And as a part of human behaviour consumer behaviour is one of the amaziest fields to get in.
How do people behave when shopping? How do people get the products that are sold? Why do they decide going to a place and not in another?

Eventhogh human being is difficult to predict, our environment in which we live everyday make us behave in a generally way that make us consum and buy in a way that don't differ pretty much from others in the same place. At this point, we get at the issue of my next paper.

What are the differences that we can percieve in consumption across countries? How different cultures and values can affect consumer behaviour? What make us behave so different from other countries and so equal from people from the same country when buying and consuming goods? Have you ever wonder why some business success in some countries and fail in others?

Having a look at the States and trying to comparing this lifestyle with the european one, I realise that culture, values, geography, politics and all the environment that envolve us during buying moment affects to our behave. For example, european countries are small and cities are really crowded in such a small space. At a result of that, cars in those cities tend to be smaller than in the states, 'cause people tend to look for practical and easy to park cars rather than big and comfortable ones. Does it mean that people have different needs or the same need has to be satisfyed in a different way?

Those and many other issues will be threated in my paper, as a way to understand different cultures and how it affects the way the consumer behave and how companies can go throw that issue so as to take advantage instead of fail.


One related articles: Convergence and divergence in consumer behaviour. Marieke De Mooij

How does Store merchandising can influence on our shopping decisions?

If you are a smart shopper, it is not that easy to persuade you to actually buy something. There is the science behind how the products are organized, labels are written and sections are ordered to guide you through to making a purchase. That’s a wealth of tricks based on psychological theories and practices that in the end convert you from a regular visitor into the buyer. All these tricks are usually called merchandising techniques and could be classified in the following ones:

· Environmental: Color, Music, scents, lights,

· Design: layout, distribution, product presentation

· People: staff, customers, density

If focusing our attention in just the environmental ones, it is possible to discover some powerful tools that will enhance our customers buying one or another thing.

For example, one powerful method to appeal to a potential buyer is applying color theory to commerce. Has it ever occurred to you why you feel safer in one store and more energetic in another one? Have you ever noticed that landing on some web page you feel like clicking some button and keep browsing the site? Color is believed to be one of the most powerful elements of design for web sites, direct mail, ads, and other marketing materials. While calid colors generate a high impact in impulsive or non-planified purchases, cold and neutral colors are more useful in purchases that need a larger decision process.

Another method that produces distortions among customers is music. Have you ever perceived that in Christmas or sales period music rhythm is usually faster than in other occasions? This is because music rhythm, type and volume affects the way the consumer shops so the stores try to adapt those behaviors depending on their interests. While “slow tempo” music permits a slow purchasing rhythm, “fast tempo” music produces the opposite effect. Also, music type affects our perception in the way that traditional or known music make the customer loose perception of time while the opposite occurs when talking about not-familiar music.

As the same as music and colors, scents also affects at our senses and feelings making the customer more or less willing to any potential purchase. Did you know that in Las Vegas some particular scents are used so as to increase people’s optimism? Actually, well-combined scents can relax or even stimulate the customers as desired. Moreover, some aromas can make us evoke some feelings or perceptions like just baked bread in bakeries, coconut scent in travel agencies or leather scent in new cars. All these scents produce a distortion in our perceptions which make us feel higher quality in the case of the car or remember something special in the case of travel agency.

At the end, you might wonder if what you’ve just bought is what you really wanted or what it was really wanted you to shop. Actually, it will probably be both, ‘cause even if when you entered wanted such a detailed purchase, there’s too much unconscious tricks on the store that influence you and may change your mind.

Overwhelmed by freedom

Choices, choices, and more choices. That's a current day for a current person in any part of the world. Since we wake up until we come back to bed, thousands of choices are flooding us obligating us to decide whether to take one option or another. As a result of that, paradoxially, people usually experiment paralysis, insatisfaction and self-blame.

Does it really make sense? How can be freedom and choices the reason of such negative effects in our lives?

Thinking it over, what I feel is that the power of freedom consist on deciding wether we want to decide between many different options or just not. When applying this knowledge in marketing, there's lots of examples that make us understand my words.

For example, in Spain, the current most succesful supermarket Chain has dealt with a product range strategy that differenciate from others and seems to be paradoxal at the same time: its strategy consist on having the least brands as possible of every kind of product, what normaly means just having its own brand (white label) and the most succesful brand of each product. Actually, getting there means having less product brands than in others supermarkets, but for those who decide going there, it's supposed that they've already decided not to have so much options in exchange for other advantages. In fact, these supermarket chain is deciding for the consumer the supposed best range of products that are in the market. Then, the customer's confidence play a substantial role when deciding wheter to go to an hipermarket and decide between thousands of options or just going to this supermarket and deciding between some options already chosen for us in advance. What are they really doing? They're deciding for us, and we love that when we have de freedom to chose whether if we want some decisions done or not.

Obviusly, choices have to be in the world as freedom is a part of our lives, but people also will want to chose having less options, while also means chosing. The work of marketers, then, is to find out what should be the options and the number of options that make us feel we are deciding at a time that make us easier the chore of deciding.

What's your last name? So I can find you on facebook...

Increasingly, youth from every part of the world are using social networks as virtual community centers, stay and sit for hours and share pictures, experiences and emotions with friends from all over the world. Generation Y is socializing online as off. Actually, It's innate in this generation that people belong to facebook or some kind of electronic networking.

But...What's exactly going on with us? As a member of this generation, I assume that there are lots of significant points that are shared by most of the teens currently belonging to this "group"and need to be considered in order to be profitable for new marketers generation.
First of all, I consider we are re-born global society. Most of them bornt before internet expansion, have grown up with the development of internet and have taken advantage of that. Our generation have become global at a time the world becomes globalized. Our knowledge about the world increase exponentially at a time that any information needed is available by just a click. And, more important than that, is that we know he own this tool and we know how to use it more than our parents, a fact that gives us a competitive advantage and differenciate us from previous generation.

Moreover, external factors make us much more different that what internet itself has done with us. All bornt in a peaceful and protective environment, most have raised in dual-income and single-parent families, which have been given considerable financial responsibility and, at a consequence of this situation, have felt powerful and narcisist. Parents have tried to give us as much as they have been able in terms of education, love, and "stuff". As a result of this combination (knowledge power, high education, spoiled) most feel that can literaly "eat" the world, as the ambitions in this generation are quite higher that the ones from our parents. Actually, it does exist the need of going further and make "dreams" come true.

Another fact that affects this generation and partly comes thanks or due to internet phenomenon, is the worry about the image. Our image is so exposed to so much people around the world throw facebook or other network that there's an insight need of being perfect, beautiful and wonderful all time. I'm talking about these new trends of boob's implants for 18th birthday or a rhynoplasty at 21, for example.

Even though each member of this generation is different from another, those aspects are shared by most of them and should be considered by any companies that want to appeal to this segment. Internet is our communication tool par excellence, so marketing actions should be done throw this channel. At the same time, our generation acts as internet do: "what I need, here and right now"; which means that actions taken out of time, that require time or not available at a time, will probably fail.

So, companies, this is what I call "facebook generation," networking 12* hours a day , 7 days a week.


(*Rest 12 for sleeping and eating)

Hi,

This is Laura Coupé and it's a pleasure to welcome everybody to my Blog!
I'm from Barcelona, which is the nicest city in the world, so I invite you to visit it as soon as you can.

I hope we'll have fun with my posts!!