ethnicomm – the blog part I

Studying solely from the textbook and reviewing lecture notes sucks (except my notes of course)! Many textbook publishers have really useful websites where you can watch video cases, do online quizzes, mess with flash cards and click on related links that unfortunately are either dead, outdated or horribly lame. There are many creative people posting helpful videos that make the marketing concepts easier to understand and even more interesting.

Pricing Strategies

Product Life Cycle

The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

Consumer Market Segmentation

Postpurchase Behavior

Post-purchase satisfaction

THE CORPORATION [14/23] A Private Celebration

THE CORPORATION [15/23] Triumph of the Shill

Brand Experience vs. Brand Promise

How to Perform Customer Segmentation

Trademark and Tradedress in Product Package Design

Motivating Sequence for Copywriting: AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action!

London Barber Whacks the Competition

Selecting the distribution channel.

Channel Marketing: How and Why?

I sincerely hope the above videos have helped you review. Let me know how you did!

These are tough times for all of us. The market is down, consumer confidence is low and people aren’t spending. Businesses are not sure when things are going to improve and they are scaling back on their own purchases. On top of that, there are a gazillion web pages out there and it is even more difficult to be noticed.

photo credit: Shiny Things

Bloggeries.com, an Ottawa-based company that provides directory information, ratings, links, resources, and top rated blogs, is running a contest right now that is really creative. The prize for the winning entrant is a blue 8GB Apple iPod Nano. All you have to do is write a blog and substitute the word bloggeries instead of blog post in your blog post…err…I mean in your bloggeries. After you’ve posted it, either Twitter or Plurk bloggeries.com with the URL of your blog post to enter the contest.

Why I like this contest

1. It probably created a ton of traffic to his site. I follow the person that goes by the name bloggeries on Twitter and Plurk but have never visited his website…until now. In fact I’ve gone back several times to learn more about his services.
2. There is a story behind this. He originally won the iPod in a contest but got dinged $66 for COD which really sucks. Sharing this tale of woe engages the reader and one cannot help feeling bad for the guy. He makes an emotional connection.
3. Instead of ranting about UPS, he simply suggests that he will be using FedEx (because it may not have been UPS that decided that freight was not included). He gets kudos for taking the high road.
4. No link back to bloggeries.com is required. Every decently ranked website that uses the word bloggeries will provide further brand exposure back to bloggeries.com. If the blogger actually links back to the site, bloggeries.com will benefit from this one-way link. He gains trust and respect from bloggers that are sick and tired of sneaky, snaky linkfarms.
5. The contest only runs from Oct 9th – 16th. This creates a sense of urgency for the blogger and more importantly, a huge SPIKE in the use of the keyword bloggeries. Imagine if it made it to the top 10 list in Google Trends as a result of people searching for bloggeries? He gains his equivalent of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.
6. This contest brings out the community aspect of blogging, albeit for the selfish motive of winning an iPod.
7. Instead of whining about the economy, he is actually doing something to increase awareness of their service in a creative way.

Do you think this is creative? Have you entered the contest?