Week 6 EOC: Me X 3 (times three)

  In the world of consumer products and consumption, I find myself being brand loyal on very specific items.  Mainly due to their superior quality and longevity with their market share, I am confident I am using the best product from companies I have grown to trust.   For example, nothing shall ever replace my Skippy brand peanut butter.  Why?  Because to me, it’s the best. It is creamy,and as i was first introduced, naturally creamy.  Not because they added extra lard to make it smooth, but because they beat the peanuts into a creamy submission.  This is the flavor I am loyal too.

"...a company must identify the parts of the market that it can serve best and most profitably. It must design customer-driven marketing strategies that build the right relationships with the right customers." (Fundamentals of Marketing; pg. 175)

My second product that I am brand loyal with is Downy Liquid fabric Softener.  There was a time in my life when we only had a few choices in this product. And for most of my childhood Downy was the only choice.  Did this create my brand loyalty?  No. I tried other, cheaper, various fragrances, dry sheet and liquid alike.  I came back to downy for a few reasons. I appreciated how long downy held onto the market share in liquid fabric softeners, but more importantly, that they understood environmental impact they make on the world. This is something protector & gamble became aware of in the 1980's. How their products can change, effect and assist the world.  They became ecologically aware that they needed to take responsible for being a super power company.  This pleased me as a customer and made me lifetime loyal.  Now when I use their product I know where some of the profit margin is going; to the the Downy "Touch of Comfort" fund.  Giving hospitals, workers, patients and volunteers funds for quilts.  i am sure they are Downy clean as they are being distributed.

"The brand’s full positioning is called its value proposition— the full mix of benefits upon which the brand is positioned." (Fundamentals of Marketing pg.193)

  My final item that completes my times three post is my one and only brand of Tea. Lipton Tea.  Now, I have become flexible on how I consume this product and in what packaging I purchase this item in. However, let me set the record straight.  When I first introduced to Lipton tea, it was in the form of tea bags that went through a process called sun stewing. We literally hung the tea bags in a large mason canning jar, in the sun, until it was brewed. Not until the mid 1970's did the instant in the jar become available.  There was something about the taste, the rich flavor, the aroma of the Lipton brand that made me loyal.

"The seller can ignore segment differences and target broadly using undifferentiated (or mass) marketing. This involves mass producing, mass distributing, and mass promoting about the same product in about the same way to all consumers: (Fundamentals of Marketing; pg 186)

Lipton's mass media marketing style worked, because for awhile, they owned the instant tea market.  But it was the way the segmented their product into variations of the same thing to accommodate their customers.  What if they had no water available? They could purchase bottled tea.  What if they prefer brewing their own? Guess what, the original bags are still made today.

   These are just three items I have chosen to share with in "Me times three."  trust me, there are many more, for even more stranger reasons.  A company must adjust and listen to the consumers in order to survive. The consumer has become more fickle, more demanding and customer service oriented. Overall, it is clear to me, the big companies, do pay attention to what the consumer wants.  If they didn't (over my 40 year life span) they would not be in business today.

Week 5 EOC: Social Networks and Job Hunting

Building Trust, but Not Value

 Late Saturday, employment website Monster.com launched a professional networking app on Facebook called BeKnown. Users can import work history details from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Monster.com, connect with contacts from these sites, Twitter, or their email, and browse jobs posted by these and their second degree connections.
However, BeKnown does not let recruiters search for job candidates by parameters such as qualifications or work history unless they’re already connected to them. This significantly reduces the service’s value to recruiters, which in turn reduces the value of maintaining a profile on the app to users, as there’s little chance of being passively recruited.
Users may therefore be better off joining a more populated professional network such as LinkedIn or BranchOut, or browsing job boards than having to rebuild their graph on BeKnown.

Brand Ambassadors: Employing Real Customers to Get Out the Word on  Understanding Consumer and Business Buyer Behavior. (Fundamentals of Marketing; Chapter 5 page 143)

The major missing functionality of BeKnown is actually a conscious choice by Monster. The company has decided not to currently allow recruiters to search the profiles of all the app’s users for people who meet the criteria for certain jobs. This is ability is both crucial to recruiters who need to find candidates outside their network, and to users who want to be eligible for discovery based on their skills by recruiters they’re not connected to. Without this feature, users may as well just browse Monster.com.

"Matt Mund, Monster.com's vice president of product management, acknowledged that Facebook as a recruiting platform is growing rapidly. The company, which hosts a job board and other recruiter services, launched its own Facebook app, dubbed BeKnown, in June, and the application now has nearly 800,000 monthly users,according to AppData.com, a market research group. Over the next couple of weeks, the company plans to launch a program where companies can offer employees cash rewards for making referrals through the app."(Job Recruiters Turn to Facebook to Find Candidates -Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved)

  If the creators of BeKnown, truly want to become leaders in the job hunting market, in this high unemployment era, they may want to reconsider their parameters of job searching and qualifying applicants.  Why not have a search engine that acts like a head hunter? Maybe monster will pick up the proverbial dropped ball.

Source: Job Recruiters Turn to Facebook to Find Candidates - WSJ
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/27/monster-beknown/

Week 4: EOC : Consumer Vs. Buisness Marketing

The most obvious difference between the two concepts is that business marketing tends to concentrate on the sale of goods and services between businesses. On the other hand consumer marketing is just that…it tends to concentrate on the sale of goods and services to consumers.

Consumer buyer behavior refers to the buying behavior of final consumers—individuals and households that buy goods and services for personal consumption. All of these final consumers combine to make up the consumer market. (Marketing An Introduction: page 4 )

Despite this long history, Only in the last twenty five years has the real understanding of the concepts of business marketing take place. During this period various professionals defined the characteristics of business marketing and defined rules which would shape marketing strategy. Ordinary entrepreneurs now had an opportunity to apply some of these concepts to their own organizations with success by data collecting on demographic, psychological and social factors.

Cultural factors exert a broad and deep influence on consumer behavior. The marketer needs to understand the role played by the buyer’s culture, subculture, and social class.A consumer’s behavior also is influenced by social factors, such as the consumer’s small groups, family, and social roles and status.Two or more people who interact to accomplish individual or mutual goals.(Marketing An Introduction: page 6, 12,13 )

Consumer marketing has been visible to the public, both formal and informal. Seeking the key to consumer's buying decisions and how to control this power.  Furthermore it has been repeated over and over again to the extent that the consumers have entered some form of clandestine pact with the retailers to develop conventions and systems that ease the path towards trade.

A person’s buying choices are further influenced by four major psychological factors: motivation, perception, learning, and beliefs and attitudes.(Marketing An Introduction: page 23)

 Finally, Issues such as credit and barter as well as the cycles of pricing are quite familiar to most consumers, making them less comfortable with the concepts of business marketing. This tends to be the domain of  management and long standing retailers. However because of the inter-connectivity of economic activity, there is scope for both types of marketing to be working together. In layman's terms, give the consumer what they want and they will show brand loyalty, hence good profit margins.