Real Case Stories

Watch the video to know how: Buy a copy of 'Catlin the Artist Shooting Buffalos with Colt's Revolving Pistol' ca. 1855 on Amazon.com Source: Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) by Herbert G. Houze 10 Things You May Not Know About Samuel Colt by Christopher Klein Samuel Colt and George Catlin: Art and Product Placement by Rsimonse Catlin the Celebrated Indian Traveller and Artist, Firing his Colt's Repeating Rifle Before a Tribe of Carib Indians in South America Americans Really Like Their Guns by Kim Hjelmgaard

What do you see in the image above? Is it a diamond? Is it a rhombus? Or is it a square, rotated  45°? In 2008, Kraft Foods Canada capitalized on this confusion to revitalize a 78-year-old brand, Shreddies. Sales of this popular breakfast cereal had stagnated. According to a consumer research done in its Canadian market, customers wanted the brand to refresh itself without it changing anything.  How to increase sales of a product that is loved by its customers just the way it is? Kraft Foods accepted the challenge and launched the new & improved Shreddie, the 'Diamond Shreddies'. Hunter Somerville's idea, an intern with Kraft Food's creative agency Ogilvy & Mather Canada, became the basis of this campaign - an 'angular upgrade' to the original Shreddie, devised by a team of 'cereal scientists'.  Diamond Shreddies: Original Square Shreddie rotated 45° Packs of 'Diamond Shreddies' was launched with much fanfare. The ...

Source: The Legend of the Potato King , New York Times Blog Why the King had to Rebrand potatoes in 1774? by Sydney Burrows Consumer Behaviour and the Potato by Maud Evelyn Potato , Wikipedia

Brands are potent, valuable and rare. Successful brands drive consumer loyalty, creating long-term economic benefits and confirming with the definition of an asset. However, as late as the 1980s accountancy was unable to accommodate these assets.  In 1984 News Group, the Australian flagship company of Rupert Murdoch's worldwide publishing empire  decided to take pre-emptive action to correct this accounting anomaly and included a valuation  for ‘publishing titles’ in its balance sheet.  News Corporation did this because, being an acquisitive company, it had to find a way adjust its acquired "goodwill". Following the accounting standards of the day - deduct acquired goodwill from shareholder equity - would have ravaged the corporation's balance sheet. Thus, News Group reduced the acquired goodwill by treating the brands as acquired assets.  Following the lead of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the British Bakeries and foods comp...

Content marketing began long before the internet.  Radio was an early adopter of content marketing. And one of the most prominent examples of this type of advertising is the  soap opera . In fact, content marketing led to the creation of the monicker "soap" opera.  In the golden age of radio, advertisers sponsored entire programs, usually with some sort of message like "We thank our sponsors for making this program possible", airing at the beginning or end of a program. One of the most successful examples of such advertising is  Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins - In 1933,  P&G chose it's brand Oxydol to sponsor its first radio serial, Ma Perkins .   The fifteen minute show ran five days a week and mentioned Oxydol's name twenty to twenty-five times during each episode. P&G received 5,000 letters complaining about Ma Perkins within the first week. But by the end of the first year, sales had doubled. In fact, t his commitment is regard...

The Bulova Corporation, formerly called Bulova Watch Company, is considered to be the pioneer of modern marketing techniques. Bulova Logo In 1926, when radio was a new phenomenon and not many understood the power of this new advertising medium, Bulova ran the first known radio commercial, "At the tone, it's 8 P.M., B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova time". In the 1930s, 40s, Bulova were sponsors of all of the top twenty radio shows of the time. During this same period, Bulova became the first watch and clock manufacturer to start spending more than $1 million a year on advertising.  It wasn't a surprise, thus, when in 1941 television advertising became legal, Bulova produced the first-ever TV commercial. This 10-second commercial depicted a Bulova clock and the map of the United States with the live voice-over  "America runs on Bulova time." This ad cost Bulova all of $9 , which in today's money is $150 , and was watched by 4000 Americans. Apart...

Ray Kroc in the 1940s owned a successful Milkshake mixer distribution business. In the beginning of 1950s his business started to slow down. In the US there was an exodus from the cities to the suburbs and many neighborhood soda fountains were forced to close down. But one small restaurant in San Bernadino kept ordering more machines. He flew down and met the McDonald brothers who ran the restaurant. When Ray Kroc joined the McDonald brothers, he envisaged thousands of Mc Donalds outlets across the country. In trying to identify the best locations, he used to fly over towns looking for church steeples. He believed that good American families would live around churches and that's the kind of customers he was looking for. src Consumer Behavior by Schiffman/Kumar

What is the effect of color on our Behavior? The Australian government hired a research agency to find out what is the world's ugliest color and they came up with Pantone 448C.  The purpose of this activity was to color cigarette products with this colour to dissuade people from smoking. Check this video below

In this research paper by Michael Luca, "Reviews, Reputation and Revenue: The case of Yelp.com"   the author has a few interesting findings.  The notable one being that in markets where Yelp penetration has increased, chain restaurants have declined in market share. This may indicate that with greater visibility of independent restaurant through reviews, customers are more likely to experiment and visit newer places unlike markets where reviews are unavailable. In a market without reviews people probably choose eating places on the basis of popularity or because of the sheer marketing muscle of the chains.  The few other highlights as quoted by the author are (1) a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue,  (2) this effect is driven by independent restaurants; ratings do not affect restaurants with chain affiliation.  (3) chain restaurants have declined in market share as Yelp penetration has increased. This suggests th...

In his book "Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion", the author Robert Cialdini cites 2 examples where change in pricing/positioning influenced the decision of the buyer. In the first example a Jewelry shop owner was desperately trying to sell a piece of Turquoise set. It was the peak of the tourist season with the store full of customers but the set just wouldn't move despite the set being of good quality and reasonable price. She tried positioning it in the store and even getting the sales staff to push it but to no effect. Finally, in desperation when she was leaving for an outstation trip, she left a note to her Sales Head instructing her to price it at 1/2. When she returned she was not surprised when she was told that the pieces were sold off however she was shocked when she learnt that her sales Head misread the 1/2 to 2 and had in fact doubled the price. The author talks about preconceived notions that we have and one of them that we have is that Expensiv...

During Christmas , Dec 2015, Finland came up with a Calendar with their own set of country themed Emojis. The Finland emojis illustrate Finnish emotions and strengths, as well as vices, and are part of the Christmas calendar published by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on ThisisFINLAND , the country brand website. The complete list of emojis are available here . Some good ones are   THE ORIGINAL SANTA. The feeling of the never-ending wait for Santa Claus. The real Santa comes from Finland. He has always lived in Korvatunturi, Lapland. Not the North Pole!  HEADBANGER. The feeling of banging your head. In Finland, heavy metal is mainstream. There are more heavy metal bands in Finland per capita than anywhere else.  BUS STOP.  Finns respect the privacy and personal space of others, and expect the same in return. We tend not to sit down next to anyone if another seat is available. When talking to a Finn, don’t stand too close – unless you want to se...

In his book "Grow", former P&G executive Jim Stengel talks about what differentiates a top performer from the rest of the pack.  He researched more than 50,000 brands and concluded that brands that centered their businesses on the ideal of improving people’s lives resonate more with consumers—and outperform their category competitors.Top performing brands are built on ideals, higher-order purposes that transcend products and services.  Stengel concludes that the best-performing businesses are driven by brand ideals; that touch on five human values - “eliciting joy, enabling connection, inspiring exploration, evoking pride or impacting society”  In the book he cites an example of how Pampers lost market share by focusing too narrowly on nappies’ dryness, before he redefined its brand ideal as “helping mothers care for their babies’ and toddlers’ healthy, happy development”. He came up with the Stengel 50 and compared the growth with other brands....

This HBR article , cites Jack Daniels' marketing example. It says that most Iconic brands are cultural innovators. They leapfrog the conventions of their categories to champion new ideologies that are meaningful to customers. Whiskies compete to be perceived as upscale and masculine . In the 1950s the major brands aligned themselves with the image of the sophisticated modern corporate executive . Jack Daniels was a small Whiskey producer and was being trounced by the National players. Jack Daniels was running ads showing corporate executives drinking their whiskey, however nothing worked. The firm then pursued a cultural branding approach. The assumption was that because masculine ideals are shaped by society, they change over time. During the cold war, the corporate executive seemed too sedentary. The public was then drawn to the Old Wild West and the popularity of Wild west films also indicated towards this shift. Jack Daniels distillery was in rural Tenn...

Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus. src Wiki . If a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later asked to complete a word starting with tab, the probability that he or she will answer table is greater than if they are not primed. women who are sometimes less confident in leadership roles can be primed to feel empowered and more confident when delivering a speech in public if they can see a photograph of a powerful political female figure like Angela Merkel or Hillary Clinton src Marketing Society Female and male students were asked to give a public speech in a room with a poster of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Bill Clinton, or no picture. Researchers recorded the length of the speech as an objective measure of empowered behavior in a stressful leadership task. The gender leadership gap disappeared when women were exposed to a female role model: Female speakers who spoke in f...

In her article "5 reasons to bring Brand into the boardroom", Deloitte's principal Jennifer Baron quotes Abraham Lincoln's words: "Character is like a tree, reputation is like its shadow". She states that Brand building is not about manipulating the shadow but it is about nurturing the health of the tree. In her report she highlights how Brand is the most important intangible asset of a company and it is estimated at approximately 15% of the market cap of top tier organisations. Apple is at 26% and McDonalds' is 42%. Read the report here http://cmo.deloitte.com/5-reasons-to-bring-brand-into-the-boardroom/   Jennifer's profiles on Linkedin -  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferjbarron

In the late 90s P&G created an odorless air freshener spray. They launched a campaign showing a woman complaining about bad odor and remarking to her friend that using Febreze will eliminate odor. The marketers anticipated great sales but the product didn't take off at all. Old Febreze ad To understand why it didn't sell, they conducted in depth consumer surveys to figure out what went wrong. However, they could not find an answer until they visited the house of one of the respondents. The woman was a cleanliness freak with 9 cats. However, when the P&G team walked into the house they were overpowered by the strong odor of the cats. When the owner was asked what she thought about the cat smell, she replied saying "Isn't it wonderful, they hardly smell at all!".  The reason why Febreze wasnt selling was because people don't detect bad smells because they get used to it.  P&G then employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze what...

Behavioral analysis is becoming a new tool in the hands of marketers. According to this NYT story , Target's statistician received a brief from the marketing department “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”.  After analyzing the voluminous data that Target collects, the trends that he observed were that Pregnant ladies tended to Buy large quantities of unscented lotions In the first 20 weeks, pregnant ladies loaded up on supplements like Calcium, Magnesium and Zinc Buy Hand sanitizers Buy Extra bags of cotton balls  He came up with a "Pregnancy Prediction score" which would analyze shopping data and predict when the shopper is due.  Target would then use this data to send out promotional material to the shoppers. One day a man walked into Target and yelled angrily at the Manager. He was furious that Target was sending coupons of cribs, maternity clothing and baby clothes to his High...

Hotel Guptaji, a small restaurant in Palanpur India situated near a railway station started a food ordering service for trains passing by. Passengers traveling on this route would call the Hotel in advance to order lunch on dinner packets which would be promptly delivered to the passenger when the train stops at the station.The delivery boys keep the change ready and the entire transaction is completed within 30 seconds.   The Hotel has even received a mention in Philip Kotler's Marketing Management , A South Asian Perspective ver 14e. Other links Contact and reviews from Justdial Tripadvisor review Books

Traditionally schools tend to use Black and White printers for teaching material. Xerox wanted to find a way to sell color printers to these schools. Xerox came up with a smart marketing idea through an Infographic that highlighted how Color content would benefit students. Watch the interview with Leah Quesada, VP Marketing of Xerox

The Decoy Effect or the Asymmetric Dominance effect is a phenomenon whereby consumers will have a specific change in preference between 2 options when also presented with a third option.  Source:  Wikipedia National Geographic conducted an experiment in a movie theater where consumers were presented with 2 Popcorn pricing options. A Small for $3 and a Large for $7. Consumers preferred the Small Popcorn. An additional variant Medium at $6.50 was added between the two. Buyers now had a distinct change in preference and opted for the Larger Popcorn. The Decoy effect is used extensively by Marketers in Pricing Strategy. Read more: How to use Decoy Effect to help buyers choose the right option Watch the Nat Geo video here: Also, watch how Economist used this effect to designed its subscription model: