Financial & Travel Musings » Marketing

Are you immune to marketing?

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:55:52 +0000

One of the advantages of doing a marketing MBA is that you become immune to many of the marketing images that we all come across in every day life.

Why that’s so isn’t entirely clear but seems to be related to knowing how the marketing is supposed to work, how it’s designed and so on.

An interesting effect nonetheless.

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Personal gifts for the love in your life

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:53:18 +0000

When you’ve been with someone for a while you tend to run out of the easy gift ideas.

It’s not that you’re not considering what to get her now and again but unique gift ideas for her are harder and harder to come by. Maybe you’ve had the idea to buy a linked series of items over a few years but it’s easy to run off the end of those or even to get bored with the predictability of them after a couple of years.

The best plan obviously is to think about gifts well in advance of when you’re going to hand them over. Thus, you could start looking actively for Christmas gifts once the summer is over, and three or four months ahead of her birthday, anniversary, etc. Put as much thought into it as you can. Has she picked up a new interest in the last year? Buy something related to that then. Has she mentioned anything more than once? (it nearly always needs mentioned more than once, doesn’t it?)

Unique to her is best if you can manage it. Something that takes account of her interests and what she’s like.

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gifts for the love of your life

Would you even know where to start with wrinkle creams

Arnold — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 22:17:23 +0000

The big problem with cosmetic treatments is that there is pretty much no correlation between what a product costs and how effective it might be.

Therefore, one viable strategy when you’re looking at, say, wrinkle creams is to simply buy the cheapest one. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, then you haven’t wasted a fortune and can move on to the next one.

It mightn’t suit the marketing people, but it’s quite viable in many products of this nature.

Crazy channel mixes

Arnold — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 21:52:02 +0000

One of the things that totally confuses me is the habit of broadcasting teleshopping on channels that don’t run 24/7.

Surely there can’t be that many people that would search out a shopping channel on the same channel number as, say, a kids channel? I can understand people watching some of these shopping channels, but when they’re on a normal shopping channel slot. And yet, the habit seems to be extending to more and more channels.

OK, I guess it doesn’t cost much to broadcast one of these channels these days. It’s just that it seems totally pointless.

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Las Vegas niche hotels

Arnold — Sun, 17 May 2009 09:04:31 +0000

Las Vegas is very much the land of niche hotels. Whereas in other places, it’s the location of the hotel that’s the most important factor in deciding upon a particular hotel, in Las Vegas it’s the attractions of the hotel itself that generally make the decision as to where to stay.

Thus you have a very wide range of differing entertainment mixes open to you depending on which hotel you go for. The most famous is probably Caesar’s Palace is probably the most famous but that’s only because it’s been around so long and more modern s like the resorts like the Stratosphere hotel are always fighting hard to attract your business so the entertainment options on offer can often be stronger than in the more established hotels.

The choice is truly massive with many aiming to attract the family market these days and thus having all kinds of things specifically for the kids whilst others aim at couples or golfing or whatever. That’s not to say that you can’t stay at one place and take in the entertainment at another because that’s exactly what many people do.

Promoting new hotel images

Arnold — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:04:14 +0000

Trying to change the perception of a hotel chain is fraut with dangers. For one thing, unless the number of customers is extremely low, you obviously don’t want to lose any of the existing customer base.

Even upgrading facilities is something best not taken too lightly. Surely not? If it’s an upgrade that doesn’t affect the price that you need to charge, then go for it. The problem is that almost all upgrades do affect the pricing structure. For instance, one really successful little restaurant chain that we generally aimed for ourselves is in the process of a major facelift. I stress “facelift” becase the offerings haven’t changed dramatically though the naming of the items on the menu has taken a distinct lurch upmarket which has been accompanied by a doubling to trebling of all prices on the menu. Net effect is that a restaurant that used to be packed pretty much all the time now has very few people eating there.

So, it’s with some tripidation that I see the hotel reservation promo over at Econolodge to accompany their new look. Still, at least they’ve heaps of market research muscle behind them so it should go really well for them.

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Just how do you sell your house these days?

Arnold — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:01:01 +0000

With the housing market in the doldrums, it takes something special to really attract a buyer at the moment and that’s where using more unique pieces in your home can make all the difference.

Obviously you need the place to be clean and tidy both inside and out. However, beyond that where you can really score is through using settings that make your place stand out from the crowd. Clearly you don’t want to be spending a fortune on these but you don’t need to. For example, vessel sinks come in around the $500 mark but are something that will really make your vanity unit stand out from the sameness of most store bought installations.

Outside you should look towards more durable pieces. For example, whilst the plastic chairs might be cheap and work well, it’s much more appealing to get something in a wrought iron style.

These little improvements won’t cost a lot but can make the difference in being able to sell your home.

The key part of your engine

Arnold — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:08:11 +0000

The key part of your engine is one of the very smallest, namely the bearings.

These tiny little things come as part and parcel of just about every piece of machinery that we use these days so the things are produced by the million right around the world and oodles of different sizes too of course. Although seemingly trivial these little items are naturally essential to keep the various moving parts actually moving: you definitely notice them if they’ve rusted up for sure.

And, of course, they’re used in those neat little puzzles for the kids.

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Isn’t it disappointing how little thought gets put into some marketing?

Arnold — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:30:15 +0000

Perhaps the best (worst?) example of this is in the area of promotional products where just a little bit of thought can bring substantial improvements to the effectiveness of the marketing spend.

How many times have we all received products that bear no relation to the product of the company? OK, it’s not always easy to think of a completely relevant promotional item but what’s very common is to come out with some really cute item which goes straight into the hands of people who have absolutely no say whatsoever in the purchasing decision for the products of that company.

In some ways the tired old standby of a pen with a name and phone number is better than many of the more expensive items that you see these days. At least, if it’s a relatively ordinary pen then it might not be scooped up by the serial trade show attenders and perhaps some of them will find their way to those with the purchasing authority in the company of your customers. For the less appropriate and more expensive items though that’s pretty much sure not to happen as we all know.

So, put a little bit of extra thought into what you’re going to give away to potential customers and make sure that if it’s at the more expensive end of the scale that it’s something likely to end up in the hands of those with the purchase decision power.

Bumping up the income from your website

Arnold — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:46:26 +0000

When people first start out with their plans to make a fortune online one of the first strategies is to maximise the traffic to their site.

Fair enough, but no matter how high the traffic to the site may be, it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually make any money from it simply because the high traffic doesn’t equate to high conversion of viewers to customers. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.

That’s a big term for a big area. What’s entailed is a very full analysis of your site to ensure that it’s properly planned, the text is professionally written to maximise the impact for potential customers combined with analysis of how well it’s all working. Even small enhancements can mean quite substantial improvements in the effectiveness of your site in terms of converting views to actual customers.