Virgin - Corporate responsability

Richard Branson clearly cares about Virgin's customers and the impact his companies have on people and the planet. That's why he recently made corporate responsibility and sustainable development a Key priority for every one of his companies. Each must act to be more socially responsible through reducing its carbon footprint. From a marketing perspective Virgin categorises its businesses into eight socially responsible groups. Flying high, We're on a summer holiday, Staying in touch, Watching the pennies, Getting from A to B, My body is a temple, Out of this world, and just get out and relax. Each is to do good things for its industry and help to alleviate the bad things that come with the category.

For example: Virgin Wines aims to purchase only from small farms and pay fair prices. It also encourages responsible drinking practices.

Virgin Aviation represents 7 million of the 8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that Virgin emits each year. From a marketing perspective Branson has turned this challenge into an opportunity. In 2006 he announced that all dividends from rail and and airline businesses will be invested into renewable energy initiatives to tackle emissions related to global warming. Virgin has also launched its green fund which invests in solar energy, and water purification opportunities.

Further to this, Branson has also established the earth Challenge, to award $25 Million to any person who creates a way to safely remove greenhouse gases from the planet.

This insight helps me to understand that in the future and working as a marketing manager, I believe that there is a valuable lesson to be learnt from Virgin, and the degree to which it uses a corporate responsible message to deliver a green message to customers. On the flip side of this, Virgin avails free publicity through media coverage of these green marketing initiatives which are all very cool ideas.

McDonald's

McDonald's is the worlds leading Hamburger fast-food franchise, with over 32,000 restaurants in over 118 countries worldwide. McDonald's serves over 58 Million people daily, and offers them a simple, easy and enjoyable food experience for customers. McDonald's pushes the importance of its main core values quality, service, cleanliness, and value and its target market includes families and children. Accordingly, marketing efforts are targeted at these groups, through Ronald McDonald and other characters including:

• Grimace
• the Hamburgler
• Mayor McCheese

McDonald's exhibits socially responsible attributes that customer relate well with through the creation of Ronald McDonald's house charities helping children with leukemia and strives to improve children's lives. Its value proposition is to offer customers hot, high quality food at a great value at the speed and convenience its customers require. Although, McDonald's offers its customers a high quality consumer experience rather than a quick and cheap fast food option.

It has recently changed its menu to a include healthier options and worked towards training staff better eradicating poor customer service and dirtier restaurants.

This insight helps me to understand that in the future if I was a manager there is great value in spending time to craft and execute a marketing plan that considers strategic insight on how to improve on the company's 5 P's - people, products,promotions, price and place. Especially to allow local stores to adapt to local preferences and cultures. For example: McDonald's introduced a premium M burger in France, and a pepper McPuff in China. Some food changes recently helped to turn the company around. These included offering more chicken options as beef consumption started to decline and removing super size options after the documentary "Super Size Me" which targeted McDonald's and its link to Obesity. While many of the healthier options targeted Mums, McDonald's introduced a snack menu which targeted the lower-income bracket and teenagers.

Further more in the future there is a great lesson to be taken from McDonald's ability to re market the brand, and adapt the company to its marketing challenges. I think that it has successfully used marketing to re establish its "second wave" McDonald's brand, achieved through refurbishments, McCafe transformations to restaurants , and its current campaign jingle "I'm loving it".

GE

In terms of its approach to pricing aircraft engines, GE Aircraft engines knows that purchasing an aircraft engine is multimillion dollar expenditure for their customers (airlines), and one that does not end at the point of purchase. Customers face continued maintenance costs to meet certain international safety regulations to ensure reliability of their engines. Within this context, in 1999, GE launched a marketing campaign titled : "Power by the hour" which provided their customers to pay a fixed fee for every hour they run their engine. On the flip side, GE performs all the maintenance and guarantees the engines reliability. When demand for air travel is uncertain, "Power by the hour" provides GE Aircraft Engine's customers with a lower ownership cost, that is, valued by them, this also creates a degree of stickiness..

This insight helps me to understand that in the future if I was a manager and I wanted to know the degree to which it is important to exhibit an understanding of business markets in this manner and adapt your way of doing business to connect with what customers want and value especially within an ever changing marketing and business environment. Its also a very good example of getting customers to stick to the products on offer and remain loyal to my company.

Ferrero

Ferrero is an Italian confectionary Brand holding 7.3 % of the worlds chocolate market.

Within Australia, the company’s most identified brands include:

• Nutella;
• Tic-tacs; and
• Ferrero Rocher.

The company’s emphasis is on quality, integrity, product innovation and passion and it aims to hold a solid and secure retail supply chain that will never let its consumers down. That is, the company strives to never compromise its customer relationships.

Ferrero also strives to understand market preferences through extensive taste testing. In fact, within Australia it often performs market tests within one state before going national.

Some other examples of its innovative marketing methods to engage with customers include:

The company has successfully marketed Ferrero Rocher within gift packs as a lower calorie alternative to traditional Indian Milk sweets in up market customer circles of India.

It has also associated Nutella (collaboration) with soccer sponsorship deals, which resulted in an increase of Nutella’s household penetration from 15.1 to 16.3%.

The company has also engaged in community programs, such as food bank, which distributes food donations to welfare recipients.

From an online marketing perspective, it has created a Facebook page and IPhone applications to promote Tic Tacs enabling Ferraro to successfully use technology to market its product better through engaging with customers online. For example, the degree to which people like Tic-Tacs on Facebook where I found that over 46,000 customers currently like the tic-tacs page on Facebook. However, it is worth noting that over 223,454 Facebook users like another page that is titled “I was a young rebel, I smoked candy sticks and took Tic-tacs:P” ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/i-was-a-young-rebel-i-smoked-candy-sticks-and-took-Tic-tacs-P/103094879733089 ) this coverage is a very successful and simple way to market their products online.

Recently, the company also introduced the Pink Tic-Tac to promote Pink Ribbon month in support of breast cancer research and awareness.

This insight helps me to understand that in the future if I was a manager and I wanted to know the degree to which how over two hundred thousand of potential customers related to my brand I would use social media such as Facebook as an excellent tool to examine the inferences that my products were being made “fun of” by customers, and the extent to which customers relate to my brand in such humorous manners.

In sum, using Facebook in this manner, Ferrero avails free advertising through enabling customers to make a relationship with their tic-tacs brand. This kind of connection with customers creates a deeper engagement and provokes the reasons they choose Ferrero’s confectionery, and may also trigger a new reason for an existing customer to remain loyal to it in the future.

Microsoft

Microsoft (MS) is the worlds most successful software company. Established in 1975, it is the 3rd most valuable brand in the world. To achieve this it established the DOS operating system, and created a user acceptance through consumer behaviour that expects revamped editions to its products. It has also successfully marketed to consumers via having its operating software pre-installed on Personal computer (PC) hardware in collaboration to IBM.

MS mostly advertises within PC magazines. MS has also successfully launched a series of Windows operating systems, from windows 95 to Windows 7.

In 1995 MS successfully launched Internet explorer providing its software to customers free, in a bundle with its MS Office products. That is, automatically users of MS office became MS Explorer users. The brand has been associated with providing software for effective computers at low cost.

During its launch of Windows Vista, MS's brand image was tarnished due to a series of bugs experienced by customers.

During its time of experiencing issues with windows vista, Apple released a series of campaigns aimed at tarnishing MS's brand reputation as being pron ed to viruses and bugs. Fundamentally, Apples aim was to deposition MS's brand and tell customers what they stood for at this time. However recently MS has released a series of ads using Apple's campaign creating its own marketing message creating the "I'm a PC - and I've been made into a stereotype". MS is successfully using humor to break this stereotype using celebrities to open stories to create deeper engagement with consumers, and continue to learn firsthand about what they want and how they purchase their MS software. For example, one of the ads features Bill Gates (CEO) commenting on how the company has successfully used its software to connect billions of people.

This insight helps me to understand that in the future if I was a manager such as Bill Gates, and my company encountered a similar deposition issue, it is a good thing to acknowledge tarnishing ads to gain customer trust back in this manner. The main reason for this, is because, I believe that you want to connect with customers on the same level that made them choose your brand in the first place. That is, reconnecting with them creates a deeper engagement and provokes the reasons they choose your brand, or remain loyal to it, and from a marketing perspective, I must understand peoples views of them self, others, organisations (such as apple) about my brand. I must also take into account the accelerating pace of technological change, opportunities for innovation (windows 7) and how to market these factors in an ever changing world of marketing.

Disney

Disney works at sustaining life long relationships with consumers from child hood to adulthood. This is achieved throug continually expanding product and service offerings whilst at the same time maintaining its brand integrity.

This largly achieved through Disney's understanding of the emotional connection that we have with its various brands and what we love most about them. Fundamentally this clutivates a connection caled the Disney experience.

Reflections

Some of the things that IKEA is doing right to reach its customers include:

Having a fun and modern product range; Visual merchandising options within its store; its catalogue is used to reach people with new furniture solutions. Personally from my point of view, IKEA does what it takes to find the right communication style to reach its customers. IKEA uses the build it your self method, and attracts customers that enjoy putting their furniture together. In the USA the company modified the size of its standard drinking glasses to meet customer needs, that is, they released a larger drinking glass product range. IKEA also maintain a very close relationship with their suppliers. To this end, this enables them to buy quality and bulk items which enables the company to keep its prices low.