miércoles, 28 de diciembre de 2011

Don't judge a book by its cover

When I just arrived to my first lecture on New Marketing at the Fachhochschule I had no idea of what was going on, what the subject was about or what the teacher wanted us to learn. I admit I was quite skeptic. When we received the task for our group project, I had no idea what we were meant to do and how we were going to do it.

In our last lecture and seeing what our other colleagues had done we got scared thinking we hadn't understood our task. After our presentation we met the teacher and it turned out that he actually liked our project very much. What we had to learn with the project and with this module, was that once we enter the business world, we are not always going to get clear tasks, our bosses are not going to tell us exactly what to do and how to do it. We have to open our minds, be creative, have good ideas and know how to make them work.

We see innovation all around us without even noticing it, and that is one of the things I've learnt in New Marketing. People use marketing tools in their businesses and in their personal lives. We are trying to sell ourselves in a big market that we don't even know exists.

For instance, celebrities play constantly with their image, sometimes for good, other times for bad, but all of it is marketing. Lady Gaga, the media godess, has a huge knowledge of sociology of fame, and know how to get attention and make people see what she wants them to see. Kate Moss for example, was caught drunk and snorting a line of cocaine in a club in 2005. At that moment, her image (apparently) fell down to the ground and fashion houses such as Chanel and Burberry cancelled the contracts that they had with the top model. Before the scandal, Moss was earning 5 million dolars per year, after the tough pictures were published in The Mirror, she has been earning 9 million dolars per year. That horrible scandal, made her doble her cache as a model.

H&M, the swedish house, has been doing collaborations with big fashion brands for the last couple of years. Starting in 2004 with the one and only Karl Lagerfeld, and continuing with Stella McCartney, Victor&Rolf, Cavalli, Jimmy Choo and Lanvin amongst others. H&M has been selling designer outfits with H&M materials and at reasonable prices.
New York Times says that these fashion brands don't make that big profits when collaborating with the swedish company. Why do they do it then? Pure marketing. Some fashion brands as Lanvin or Versace offer exclusive products where the average customer can not always access. I have worked for Versace in Madrid for more than a year, and I have to admit, that the collaboration with H&M created a lot of interest amongst customers. The 17th of November, this collection came out in selected H&M stores over the world. I went the next day to the store in Marktgasse and except for a pair of shoes, everything was already sold out, imagine in a city in which people care about fashion more than in Bern. In Madrid, people had been in a queue for several hours at night before H&M opened its doors and emptied the shops in a couple of hours. Stores in Rome, Milan and London sold out right after the opening too. With this collabs, all of the filtrations of images of the collections, celebrities wearing the clothes, promotional videos, runway shows and all of the media that comes along with it, both H&M and the fashion house they are collaborating with get much more attention than with a traditional fashion presentation. This, in figures, translates to millions of dolars in adversing and a huge media impact very beneficial to both parts.

Fashion and music are only two big markets where you can see new ways of selling yourself or your products and getting attention, but new forms of publicity are used everyday. From technolody, internet and regular advertising to other techniques such as aromarketing (using aromatheropy in your business to provoke a specific sensation), ways of getting into people's minds and staying there for the longest time as possible.

And this is what I have learnt in this module, to see everything as a tool to sell, to catch the customers eye and to be liked. Our brains have incredible skills and if we think outside of the box, open our minds and be different. Staging has particularly caught my attention during the module and as an aspiring PR and event organizer, has given my ideas and expanded my horizons.

With this blog, I thought we were meant to talk about class topics and saw it more as a school task than as a personal choice, now that the module is over, I don't plan on forgetting about this account, but I plan to start building up from here and write about topics that catch my attention as well as sharing experiences that enrich me as this module has done.

jueves, 6 de octubre de 2011

Three apples changed the world.

Adam and Eve's forbidden apple, Newton's apple, and the one we talked about in our introductory class for New Marketing at the Bern Fachhochschule, Steve Jobs' Apple.

In our first class we learnt about storytelling and deepened into Apple's story. Apple's hero passed away last Wednesday 5th October at the young age of 56. We have all heard about Steve Jobs and about how he changed the world, not only with his inventions, but with his phylosophy. The man who revolutioned not only computers, but mobile phones and music industry, can now rest in peace. Will this be Apple's end? Or will it just be the beggining of a new era? This is a question that must have popped into all of our minds as soon as we heard of Steve's death, and we are all willing to see what happens next.


Here we have one of his most inspiring speaches in Stanford, June 2005.



“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” S. Jobs

R.I.P