Marketing Booster Shot - Buyer Beware | Corporate Responsibility |

20 Sept, 2012
Issue # 91

Paul Writer Marketing Booster Shot

Yo!

I was reading Ben Elton's book "The other Eden" which is a plausible plot about marketing an escape from environmental degradation by building self-contained, self-sustaining artificial eco-systems. And I realized that the green messaging has dropped a lot over the past year, or even more. In Bangalore which is struggling with garbage disposal recycling is slowly being talked about, but no marketer has actually tried to benefit from this latent trends. I find smaller shops trying harder to do their thing - Olympic Sports offers to reuse/recycle packaging if customers are willing to leave it behind. Wouldn't it be awesome if other shops offered to do the same? But I digress. Just three years ago, green was being considered as a viable lever of differentiation - what happened? Was there no consumer interest? Or corporate interest? Or is green not a hot topic in a down economy?

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that my piece on luxury at the bottom of the pyramid has generated boardroom conversations around this topic. So here's a companion piece - with some practical tips on marketing such a product.

Happy Ganesh Chathurthi to those who celebrate it, and enjoy the rest of the week!

Buyer Beware

Jessie Paul

How much is that doggy in the window? The dangers of price differentiation

The whole idea of making profits by selling cheap is relatively new anywhere in the world. There are a few well known international icons - a Wal-Mart in the US, Zara and IKEA in Europe. The Tatas tried it with hotels - Ginger - and seem successful, and then with Nano, which had positioning hiccups. Some of the Reliance brands and the telecom industry have succeeded with a similar model as has Big Bazaar. But these are often perceived as lower-end brands because of the price.

I am now seeing firms across real-estate, healthcare, education try to differentiate on price. They are applying frugal engineering techniques or using innovative sourcing to achieve a significantly lower price point with little or no deterioration in experience. Where a brand is the first in the space to do this, with great fanfare, they communicate that huge cost advantage to their customers. Expecting to receive warm hugs of welcome. And are greeted with silence. If they are lucky. Or rotten tomatoes if they are not. They get labelled as frauds, and makers of substandard goods. A tiny error and it is used to show how shoddy their workmanship is.

Read the completer article here...

Innovation as a Human Enterprise

by Tim Leberecht

When we talk about enablers of innovation, we essentially talk about enabling forces that help us to unleash our very humanity. Innovation brings us to life because it connects our vision, our ideas of a better future, with our enormous ingenuity and capacity for proactive change. More innovative business means more human business. The WEF Tech Pioneers and Social Entrepreneurs who were awarded in Tianjin, as well as the remarkable social technology start-up founders and employees I had met in Beijing just before the AMNC, all exemplified this spirit.

As several sessions looked at enablers of innovation, they examined what China can learn from Western-style innovation, but increasingly also what the Western world can learn from China (which, for example, is creating the world's largest market for mobile learning).

One enabler of innovation, relevant worldwide, is a more effective link between academic research and business in order to overcome what William Green, chairman of Accenture, called the "Innovation Trap" in the session on smart growth and smart economies.

Read on for more...

Heineken's Facebook Engagement Reaches for the Stars

by Peter Claridge - Unmetric

Heineken is something of a Jupiter sized gas giant (but not full of gas, of course) when it comes to beer brands on social media. They just crossed 8m fans this month, which makes all the other beer brands look like Pluto-esque dwarf planets by comparison (although I'm at pains to point out that unlike Pluto, Bud Light, Budweiser and Carlsberg have not yet been downgraded from their current classification of being a beer). Infact, no other alcoholic brand even holds a solar sized flare to the total number of fans Heineken has

In the last 30 days, Heineken has seen its fanbase grow by over 4.3%. Even though this is somewhat off the mark of the sector average, which saw a 10.7% growth, even a 4.3% growth equates to over 330,000 new fans. Impressive by any astronomical measurement you care to use.

Read the case study here...

Breathe New Life into Your Home Page, Gain Loyal Readers

By Mark Sherbin - Content Marketing Institute

The common perception of the relationship between environmental friendliness and profits used to be mutually exclusive i.e. high profits lead to low eco-friendly functioning, and vice versa. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was an 'extra' that was rarely, if ever, highlighted.

But this was a decade ago. Since then there has been a radical change in the perception of environmental friendliness and a rise in CSR.

Although companies have always viewed 'green' as just another fashionable status to tag their company with, it is now an important element in their customer value chain and Innovation. Earlier, companies embraced CSR for the primary reason of differentiating their brand in the crowded marketplace. However, because CSR is now relatively more common among companies, the rules of the 'green' game are changing. It now looks at -

Environment Conservation with an impact to the bottom line is being focused on as Businesses work towards a Responsible Environment.
Community Development is also key focus given the impact the business has on the neighborhood and work towards being a Responsible Citizen.

Customer behavior is also changing all over the world.