It's Turkey day! oh wait, it's Christmas!?

Holiday special promotion is a big issue every end of a year : Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Sales, and new year's clearance and more and more. Promotion is the coordination of a marketer’s communication efforts to influence attitudes or behavior. I went to Wal-Mart two days after the thanksgiving, and marketers of Wal-Mart tries to attract customer with this holiday special promotions. They put a sign saying "Merry Christmas" while I am still in thanksgiving mood, and they also created special shelves with Candies and Christmas gifts. Promotions do attract customers to buy more stuff if the marketers understand well about how the promotions work. What I wonder is that are the gifts and candies cheaper than usual? I'm sure some of them are, but I think they are exaggerating the products with packaging. Those green and red packaging makes look everything in the product good. I think, One day, I am going to find out the actual price of the products when not promoting and that of the products while promoting for holidays, and compare them.

Special promotions for batteries. "Power your Holidays for Less". I think it's a pretty good slogan, but I wonder why does Wal-Mart have special promotion for batteries in Christmas days. It would be more understandable if Wal-Mart was promoting one specific brand's batteries, but this promotion actually includes Duracel, Energizer and Rayovac. Why?

Chap 11. Promotion

My thought about distribution

In my definition, Distribution is the flow of products, information and "MONEY". (I did say this during class for an extra credit, and he said he is going to put this on the slides. I mean I'm just proud of myself) Distributions is critically important for suppliers and consumers. Distributions is a huge influencer of the price that consumers buy and placing which is one of the concepts of Marketing mix. Price of the product depends on how many distribution channels are there, how much money distributors want to charge for their work, and what distributions channels a producer uses. According to Mr. Featherman, a distribution channel is the series of firms or individuals that facilitates the movement of a product from the producer to the final customer. This is the end. This post is written based on my thought about distribution after learning about this distribution, so there could be some wrong information. Please, Feel free to correct it by commenting. By the way, I added a very funny video that shows some distribution can fail in the process.

Pricing for international products

We learn about pricing in Marketing class. The pricing we are learning in the class only focuses on general and broad concept of pricing. Since I am an international student, and I want to do international business when i grow up, I decided to find out about how to price for each product for each country. I found this video on Youtube (the greatest source I call). He specifically explains how to apply expanded pricing strategy used in the United States to Indian Market. Generally, Marketer must know how cultural variables will affect sales. Marketers must know what aspect worked in this country while it did not work in the other country. Also, They should know what aspects work in both countries. According to him, People tend to actually believe advertisements in India, so there should be less cost for promotion and advertisement. Like India's case there are many cultural variables existing out there. Marketer must consider those variables when setting price for a product.







Chap 9. Pricing

Wal-mart's own brand "Great Value"

In these days, Retailers not only deliveres final products made by suppliers and producers, but also produce their own brand products. According to Pearson's Marketing Principle, Brand is a name, a term, a symbol, or any other unique element of a product that identifies one firm's product(s) and sets it apart from the competition. "Great Value" is a brand owned by Wal-Mart, and it is known for its cheap price. From detergent to peanut butter, Various products are produced with the mark of Great Value. Great Value brands are usually cheapest among each product category. I guess it has advantage of low cost of retails since Wal-Mart owns the brand, and the products of Great Value brand definitely do not go for good quality but for favorable price by consumers. Product line is a firm’s total product offering designed to satisfy a single need or desire of target customers (ex: all the different types of Starbucks Roasted Whole Bean Coffee). Product mix is the total set of all product lines a firm offers for sale. The product mix can be one product line or many (referred to as narrow or wide).Great Value is just one brand, but it has a wide product mix. It keeps increasing product line every year.

Chap 8. Brand and product mix