learnthe4ps.com - For students of marketing.

Many of you are developing personal marketing plans.  As you reflect on your own strengths, weaknesses, and passions, you should be narrowing down on one (or more) potential careers, industries, and/or employers (your target market).  As you gather knowledge of that target market, you will learn what hiring companies seek in new employees.  Use this information to optimize your marketing mix — so that you are best positioned to get the job/career you desire.

Toward that end, you might find the new package of articles from US News & World Report to be particularly useful.  These include the main article “The Best Jobs of 2012” (February 27, 2012), which links to a variety of different lists.  These lists are based on a wide range of criteria you can read about in the article.  The “Best 25 Jobs of 2012” includes several jobs for B-School majors:

• A few might work well for CIS majors, including:  #2 software developer, #5 database administrator, #6 web developer, and #7 computer systems analyst (that CIS concentration is looking good!),
• #16 meeting, convention and event planner,
• #20 sales representative,
• #21 accountant,
• #24 customer service representative, and
• #25 HR specialist.

If your particular career is not on the list above, check out the “Best Jobs:  Business” (a top 20 list) that includes even more jobs.  After you link through to the list, click on jobs that interest you and you can learn more about that career, including some tips for getting a job.  This is a goldmine for those of you beginning to think about that post-college career or writing a personal marketing plan.  Of course the “best” job for you is the one that fits your strengths, weaknesses and passions while also recognizing other constraints you may have on your career planning.  So go out and do that “Company” analysis so you find the best fit for you!

Scott Anthony has an interesting guest blog post at the Fast Company Co.Design blog, “3 Ways to Predict What Consumers Want Before They Know It“.  He offers three great suggestions for developing insight into what consumers want — and none of them directly ask customers.  There are also some great examples, including the  ChotuKool portable refrigerator.  This disruptive innovation targets India’s poorest households.

Read Anthony’s post.  Can you think of some potential new product ideas based on your own observations or personal experience?  Where do you, your friends, or family experience dissatisfaction that might be addressed with a product or service innovation?

Imagine walking along a city street and seeing your own face in ad for a shirt you are checking out. Or perhaps a friend’s face in an ad inviting you into a restaurant. Technology may not be too far from making this a possibility. How creepy would that be? Or perhaps it wouldn’t be creepy at all. Would we get used to it? This Slate article, “How’d My Avatar Get Into That Sneaker Ad?” (January 4, 2012) lays out this type of scenario as a thought experiment.  Read the article to get a better picture of this topic.

What do you think of this technology?  Does it creep you out?  Or is it no big deal?  Would it make you more likely to buy?

The subject of sustainability can get complicated. This video offers a quick and simple overview.  Watch the video.  What marketing examples have you seen that promote sustainability?  What are some examples that promote unsustainable business practices?  Do firms have a responsibility to be more sustainable?  Should this be enforced with greater government regulation?  If not, how?

The growth in online retailing presents a very real threat to traditional brick-and-mortar stores.  Traditional stores have some clear advantages including a physical presence that allows customers to touch/hold/see/try on something before they buy or to be able to get what they buy now.  Multichannel retailers offer multiple ways for consumer to shop — for example a physical store and an online store.  Unfortunately, most retailers that offer multichannel options do a poor job integrating those experiences.  Mitch Joel’s post, “Endless Aisles” (Six Pixels of Separation – The Blog, February 9, 2012) and an article in USA Today “Touch-screens create online shopping experiences at stores,” (February 7, 2012) offer a starting point.  The image at the right shows a Kohl’s in-store kiosk which connects to Kohls.com.

What else could brick-and-mortar stores do to better compete against online-only competition?

As you market yourself to potential employers, always be looking for ways to standout and differentiate yourself from other applicants.  For some ideas about how to do that, see “Do Your Due Diligence” (Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2012 – non-subscribers may need to click here).

What are some other non-traditional job search tips you can share?

Internet entrepreneurs in Vietnam are figuring out how to overcome challenges posed by the country’s infrastructure. Among Vietnam’s 88 million people, there is growing interest in the convenience of online shopping. There are now more than two dozen Vietnamese sites copying Groupon’s “deal-of-the-day” concept. These companies adapted the strategy used in more developed countries. So for example, few Vietnamese consumers have credit cards or PayPal style accounts. To over come this, at least one of the Groupon copycats NhomMua, relies on a team of more than 100 moped-driving couriers that deliver vouchers directly to consumers and then collect cash. Read more in this Bloomberg Businessweek article, “Vietnam’s Dot-Com Boom” (January 19, 2012).

Have you ever traveled abroad?  In a developing country?  How could some online products in the U.S. be adapted for foreign markets?  Think about some of your favorite websites — which ones transfer easily to a less-developed country?  Which require some adaptation?

The marketing strategy planning process model in this Prezi presentation provides an overarching framework for our marketing text books.  Even if you are not using Essentials of Marketing or Basic Marketing, you will probably find the model and Prezi overview will help you better understand marketing strategy planning.  I believe this will require Flash animation — so you may not be able to view it on an iPad. Here are some keys to operating the Prezi:

• Click “More” and have it play full screen — the effects are much better.
• Use the forward/back arrow to move forward/back through the presentation one step at a time
• When you come to some of the embedded videos, simply hover your cursor over the video and you will see the “play” arrow. If you click the video again, it will get larger
• For readers of our books the narration should be straightforward to figure out — probably for most viewers.
• Note that the chapter numbers correspond to Essentials of Marketing — and will differ slightly for Basic Marketing.

For everyone — this is my first Prezi. There are some things I have learned — you need to have a high resolution version of any model you zoom into. I am working on fixing that. Please tell me what you think? Does this model and this type of presentation help you to better understand marketing strategy planning?

Well there it was — another Super advertising day — and a good football game to boot.   There are tons of day after opinions on yesterday’s ads, and their insights are probably better than mine. I looked through a number of sites and wanted to recommend the following.

1. The Wall Street Journal, which has its own reader poll and comments from a wide range of advertising experts in “Auto-Industry Ads Score at the Super Bowl” (February 6, 2012 – non-subscribers may need to click here). The article lauds the “Halftime in America” ad below — while their early poll results favored the Seinfeld/Leno Acura NSX ad (also below).
2. As of this moment, the USA Today online admeter (not their focus group which reports tomorrow) shows a top five with the two Doritos ads (created in a contest), Bud Light’s “Weego,” M&M’s “Just My Shell,” and Volkswagen’s “Dog Strikes Back.”
3. You can also find plenty of pundits all over the web, but I found one of the more thoughtful analyses at the Influential Marketing Blog in the post titled “The Best and Worst Of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 2012” (February 6, 2012).

Read one or more of these articles — they offer sometimes contradictory critiques.  Then offer your own opinions — but back them up with good reasons.  Which ads do you think are most effective?  least effective?  Why?  What makes for a good Super Bowl advertisement?

How times have changed. This article starts with the results of a 1957 survey of Americans that showed 80% believed that people who preferred the single life were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic.” In 1960, 13.1% of U.S. households were “one-person” — today that number has more than doubled to 27.6%. In some big cities, the number is over 40%. You can read more about this trend and its implications for realtors, cruise ship operators, and home improvement retailer Lowe’s in “Solo nation: American consumers stay single” (CNN Money/Fortune, January 25, 2012) or in sociology professor Eric Klinenberg is new book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

What other brands could change their marketing mix to better address the unique needs of singles or those living alone?