Blog #10: Marketing Aborad

                  One of the things I’m most excited about when I think about my future career are the opportunities that I will have to travel. I think being able to travel to foreign countries for business would be really fun because you get the opportunity to experience the culture and daily life through the eyes of the working class. One of the scary aspects to me, however, would be the culture shock. How do you know what that people of that country consider good etiquette? What are topics that they would consider unapproachable?

                  The chapter that we discussed this week in my marketing class was about international business and the different ways companies are successful when they enter into the foreign market. One of the research librarians came in to talk to our class about the different resources that the library at Saint Mikes has to research international business.

Probably the coolest resource to me was called Global Road Warrior. Using this website, you can look up any country from a list of dozens. Global Road Warrior comes back and tells you pretty much everything you could possibly want to know about this country, such as things like their education system, recipes, music, and ways of transportation.

There is also a pretty interesting tab that talks about the business culture in the country. The information discussed here would be extremely helpful when traveling internationally for business. Some of the information given here discusses the country’s business experience, decision-making and negotiating strategies, meetings, attire, women in the workplace, and the workweek.

Playing around on this website, I decided to look into what business is like in Australia. It is correct business etiquette in Australia to greet someone with a firm handshake, and from then out refer to them as “mate”. Australians don’t use professional titles such as “Professor” or “Doctor” because they are deemed as showing an excessive amount of honor, and rarely use the titles Mr. of Mrs. in the workplace as well.

While Australians tend to dress similarly to Americans and Western Europeans, there are still some striking differences when it comes to business attire. Workplace dress in very modest, and therefore women keep their attire modest, often times not even bothering to put on makeup. For men, it is acceptable to wear slacks and button down shirts, and suits only on formal occasions. Australians are also extremely casual and tend to dress down for events such as an opera or theater event.

Knowing the business etiquette about a country you will be traveling to beforehand is very beneficial. Instances where you are unsure of how to dress, act, or what to say can be detrimental to a business deal. Being prepared for situations where you are unsure in essential, and Global Road Warrior is an extremely useful tool in these circumstances.

Blog #9: Marketing Help

For this blog post, I want to go back to a post I made a couple of weeks ago and expand on it. The post I’m talking about is one that I wrote about the ways that both small and large companies could use social media to improve their marketing and reach more potential customers. In that post I concluded that social media is a great tool used by companies to level the playing field between large and small companies. This is because the use of social media is free, companies can control their image on social media (to an extent), and social media promotes word of mouth marketing, which, in my eyes, is one of the most effective ways to market.

                 

                  While I was on spring break last week, I had more down time than I normally do and was able to catch up on some of my TV shows. While watching TV, the same ad for a pretty interesting company kept popping up. This company is called Constant Contact, and founded by Gail Goodman in 1998. It is headquartered out of Waltham, Massachusetts, which, ironically, is the town where that the last college I attended resides in.

These ads proclaim that Constant Contact is a company that will handle all of the social media aspects for your company, so that you can take care of running the business side (watch an ad here). This concept is really cool to me because it seems like it would take some of the stress out of marketing for a company because they could let another company work to shed them on the best light possible all over social media.

Because I was interested in this company, I decided to take a look at their website to see some of the services they offered. Naturally, a company would have to pay a fee to Constant Contact because services like this can operate for free. Constant Contact, however, offers a free trial of their services to customers to customers, so that you can get a sense as to whether or not this will be beneficial to your company.

Some of the services offered by Constant Contact are your typical Email Marketing and Online Surveys. The company also offers more creative forms of marketing as well, such as EventSpot and SaveLocal. When companies use Constant Contact’s Email Marketing resource, they are able to customize their own creative email designs, manage your contacts and grow your email list, integrate these emails with social media, and track the effectiveness of these emails. The same customization is put into the online surveys because companies can design their own surveys and polls using templates, promote these surveys so that customers see them, and track the effectiveness.

I think that the EventSpot and SaveLocal options are creative. When using EventSpot, companies can promote and spread the word about events they are hosting and special offers, and then track RSVPs, issue tickets, and gather the preferences of attendees. The SaveLocal option is also pretty useful to small companies that want to reach their local community.

I believe that Constant Contact is a very useful resource to companies, both big and small, to help with their marketing. It provides was to get the name of your company out their without spending tons of money or having to give large percentages of your profits away. It also takes some of the stress out of designing marketing strategies while still being able to add some customization. Constant Contact is another way to level the playing field between large and small companies because you’re not sinking a lot of money into getting your name out their.

Visit Constant Contact’s website here.

Blog #8: A New Age of Customization

Imagine being able to completely customize your cell phone. And no, I don’t mean being able to choose the color case you want to put on your iPhone so that it stands out in the sea of iPhones. I mean being able to choose everything, from the display size of your screen to the size of your camera, from the amount of storage internally or externally to the size of the battery. A new company, called Phonebloks, is working tirelessly to make a phone like this possible.

This past week in my marketing class, a group of students did a presentation on a chapter of our textbook that covered how to develop new products and manage their product life cycle. There are eight crucial steps to the New-Product Development Process. These steps include:        

             1.     Idea Generation

             2.     Idea Screening

             3.     Concept Development and Testing

             4.     Marketing Strategy Development

             5.     Business Analysis

             6.     Product Development 

             7.     Test Marketing

             8.     Commercialization

 We learned that the product life cycle includes four stages:

1.     Introduction

2.     Growth

3.     Maturity

4.     Decline

While these concepts were a large part of the chapter they presented on, the most interesting part to me was when they discussed the idea of the company Phonebloks. The purpose of this company is to make a phone that the consumer can keep forever. When a particular part of your phone breaks or starts not working as well as the rest, you will just replace that particular part of the phone, instead of spending the money to buy a whole new phone. This new phone will be made up of many parts; the core will be where all the accessories snap onto, a screen for the front, and then there will be many different options for the back. The basics, such as a camera, battery, and storage will be available, but their size and location will be customizable.

To make their idea work, Phonebloks turned to the internet to get the idea out. In order to make this phone possible, they knew they needed to turn to different specialists to develop the phones’ components. For instance, they thought that the camera element of the phone should be developed and made by popular camera companies such as Canon and Kodak. Consumers will be able to get the exact camera accessory they want from their favorite camera brand.

Recently, Phonebloks learned that Motorola was working to develop a phone like the one they had dreamed up. Motorola has long been one of the most trusted cell phone brands, but recently fell off the grid due to the emerging companies. This new phone will be a way to get back in the game and capture up some of the market for cell phones. Motorola and Phonebloks teamed up and have since been working to make this phone possible.

I believe that this type of phone will be extremely successful. The idea of not having to spend the money to buy a new phone every time your battery life dies is very attractive to those on a budget and also those who are aware of their impact to the environment. The largest obstacle I think a phone like this will face is competition. iPhone users are very dedicated, and many would never consider opting for another phone. In order to avoid problems such as these, Phonebloks will have to target iPhone users and convince them that the Phonebloks product is superior. 

Click here to visit Phonebloks website.

Blog #7: The Effectiveness of Social Media

A lot of people consider our generation to be addicted to social media. We are constantly checking our phones, responding to texts, and catching up on the latest news with our Facebook friends. To some, this is a curse. But to the mom and pop stores of the world, this is a big coup. This allows them to get their name out there without having to spend billions of dollars in advertising. Some would consider this an evening of the playing field between large and small companies.

Word-of-mouth marketing is probably one of the most effective forms of marketing. If you really like a product, you’re going to want to tell your friends about how awesome it is and do everything you can to convince them that they need this product. For companies, this is huge. They know that if they can provide customers with a really impressive product, people will want to spread the word. Thus, they will be getting word out about their product without having to spend any money to promote in advertising.

Facebook provides an alternative route to word-of-mouth marketing. Even the smallest companies can set up a Facebook page and start promoting their brand. This will cost them little money and can spread word very quickly. I learned recently in my marketing class that once a person has liked a company on Facebook, the website automatically has the permission to promote that company in Facebook friends’ news feeds. Because of technology such as this, word can spread very quickly on site such as Facebook and Twitter.

The internet can also be effective in promoting companies. Websites that make money off of the ads they post can look into your browsing history to find sites that you visit often. They can pull that information and use it to find which companies you would be interested in seeing ads from on their site.

Both small and large companies use social media as a way to market their brand. It provides them with a way to promote their brand without spending lots of money to get the word out there. Word travels fast online and companies can use this to their advantage. Just like talking up a product face-to-face, people use social media to give a review to a product. If someone is really satisfied with a product, they will go to social media to tell their friends just how great it is. But this can also take a negative turn. If someone has had a bad experience with a product or service, they will also turn to social media to rant about how bad it was.

I truly feel as though social media is a way the even the playing field between large and small companies. It provides companies with a cheap tool to spread the word about their brand. Social media can also be a tool used in a very effective form of marketing: word-of-mouth.