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.