learnthe4ps.com - For students of marketing.

Zappos is one of our favorite companies here at L4Ps. We also feature them in the retailing chapter in our text book. The online retailer is always innovating. Now they are using their own employees in online videos — they have produced 58,000 short videos of employees (not professional models) showing off its shoes and other apparel. The use of employees can build trust — and seeing someone actually using a product can increase its appeal. Zappos also conducted an experiment – showing the same products with and without a video. They found sales averaged 10% higher when a video accompanied the item. Check out “A New Sales Model: Employees” (Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2011 – non-subscribers may have to click here).

What do you think of this approach?  Would it make you more likely to purchase?  Which product categories would work best?

This is a nice example of marketing research – museums are hiring researchers to observe visitors and record what they see. See “The Museum is Watching You” (Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2010 – click here if the title link doesn’t work).

…watches where visitors stop, whether they talk or read, how much time they spend. He records his observations in a handheld computer, often viewing his subjects through the display cases or tiptoeing behind them to stay out of their line of sight. “Teenage daughter was with, but did not interact, sat on bench, then left,” read his notes of one visit.

The article provides a good example of marketing research in a nonprofit context.  What are the advantages of this type of research for the museum?  What are downsides or risks?

This was part of an interesting series I heard on the Marketplace radio show.  You might be surprised at how sophisticated segmentation and targeting can be after reading (it is radio and text) “Data mining pushes marketing to a new level” Marketplace, July 26, 2010.  For a follow-up with more information on clusters, see “Hey Baby, What’s in Your Cluster,” (Marketplace, July 27, 2010 – text version of radio story).