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Target Markets and Fashion Sense

Posted in Marketing with tags , on April 26, 2012 by jrvitalis

One of the most challenging tasks for anyone involved in marketing is how to identify and reach a rapidly evolving target market. In today’s business environment, that could translate into anything from identifying growth opportunities in a developing country to keeping up with social media. In my household, one of the biggest challenges is keeping up with Puppy’s growth, both physically and emotionally.

Take her wardrobe for example. Up to this point, Puppy was easy to buy for. She preferred brightly colored clothing, with dresses and tights topping the list. So when she recently grew out of everything in her closet (overnight), I didn’t think replenishing her wardrobe would be a problem.

I went shopping while she was in school and found several great bargains on clothing similar to what she’d always worn. Little did I know that she’d advanced to a new fashion plateau, leaving me (and her dresses and tights) in the dust.

When she got home from school that afternoon, I handed her a shopping bag full of brightly colored dresses.

She pulled out the first dress. Her face fell.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Um, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said, “but it’s the color of puke.”

I looked at the dress in her hands. It was darling. And it wasn’t the color of puke. It was the color of split pea soup, with little white polka dots all over it. It totally rocked her fuchsia glasses, too. But I could tell by the look on her face that I’d already lost the battle.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll take it back.”

She pulled out the next dress. Again, where I expected to see sunshine on her face, there were only storm clouds.

I looked at the purple, turquoise and pink floral-print dress in her hands. It was right up her alley. “You don’t like this one, either?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, Mom. It’s just not my style.”

At this point I was pretty shocked, but still clueless. I returned the dresses to the store and while there noticed the cutest little turquoise jacket on sale. 50% off. She’d outgrown her fall jacket and this one would be perfect for spring.

That afternoon, I pulled it out of the shopping bag, sure that I’d hit a home run.

Puppy scowled at the coat.

And that’s when it finally hit me. My target market had evolved and I’d been left in the dust.

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Product Flops

Posted in Marketing with tags , on January 13, 2012 by jrvitalis

It’s obviously worst-case-scenario for any company to invest heavily in a new product or service, only to have it flop. Yet the scenario is not uncommon. Here are a few notables:

*Cosmopolitan yogurt (Yes, Cosmopolitan as in the fashion magazine)

*Colgate kitchen entrees

*Bic underwear

And then there is the plethora of celebrity endorsements (Tiger Woods) and cancelled television shows that never live up to expectations. The truth of the matter is, no one really knows for sure what is going to work, and what isn’t. The same holds true of parenting techniques, and what works with one child often doesn’t work with another.

For example, my family was having dinner with Squirrel, Otter and their parents. The kids were outside eating while the adults enjoyed a quiet dinner inside. Suddenly, Otter banged in the house and demanded a glass of water from her mother.

In our house, when our children forget their manners, I often use humor to remind them. I decided to do the same with Otter.

“Otter,” I said, “don’t you mean please may I have a glass of water my mother whom I love and adore?”

She looked at me like I had three heads.

“Quick,” I grinned, “say ‘please my mother whom I love and adore’ before your mom drinks all your water!”

After a few more rounds, she realized that playing along was the only way she was going to get her cup filled, and she acquiesced.

“Please, mother my door,” she mumbled.

I started to explain that it was “mother whom I love and adore”, but by that time she’d given up on the water and disappeared back outside.

Thank goodness I hadn’t invested any time or money in that one––my efforts were definitely a flop!

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SWOT Analysis

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , on August 12, 2011 by jrvitalis

SWOT analysis, or identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats is often a valuable tool companies use in assessing whether or not to bring a product or service to market. It wasn’t until last night that I realized it is a tool not unlike that which Puppy uses on the playground every day.

We were over at Squirrel and Otter’s house for dinner. A neighbor boy joined the kids playing, and at dinnertime Squirrel and Otter’s mom invited him to join us for dinner.

“Puppy won’t be upset, will she?” she asked me.

It was a fair question. After all, Puppy was over for a play date with Squirrel. Having another kid around, particularly a boy, could potentially totally throw off the group dynamics.

But I thought through the many similar situations we’ve encountered at the park. Puppy will be playing happily with a child when another arrives on the scene. In these situations, I believe Puppy’s SWOT analysis looks something like this:

Strengths: I really like people, and this kid looks fun.

Weaknesses: How am I going to know which one of these kids to play with?

Opportunities: This kid might know some really great games.

Threats: What if this kid takes over, and I’m left with no one to play with?

When Puppy was younger, she focused more on the weaknesses and threats, and it took some mommy intervention to get her to welcome additional children to the playground. Now that she’s older, she’s generally able to conduct her SWOT analysis quickly and independently.

So as she climbed into her chair at the dinner table last night, I watched her closely, wondering how she’d react to the addition of another kid.

She patted the chair next to her. “He can sit right next to me.”

Either she’s a future product manager in the making, or she believes in keeping her friends close and her enemies closer.

P.S. Just a note that there will be no post next week as we’ll be out of town for our annual Door County camping trip. See you the week after!

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A Trip to the Hot Desert

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , , on June 10, 2011 by jrvitalis

We’ve talked before about the Four P’s: Price, Product, Promotion and Place. Marketing gurus spend countless hours examining their product from every angle, trying to determine the correct marketing mix in order to best reach their target market. And there is no doubt that these efforts pay off; marketing plays a critical role in today’s economy.

But at the end of the day, the product has to stand on its own two feet. Today’s consumers are savvy, and they know immediately if a product isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The same goes for my three-year-old. So when my husband and I booked tickets to Las Vegas last week, we positioned our “product” in the best possible light. We talked about how special it was going to be to spend time with Great-Grandma. We also mentioned that we’d be taking an airplane and reminded kitten how lucky we are that Grandma has a pool, since it’s really hot in Vegas in the summer.

All in all, both Puppy and Kitten seemed pretty excited about the trip, so we thought we’d done a pretty good job with our pitch.

Until yesterday, when Kitten was carpooling on the way to school with a friend. Out of the blue, she announced:

“I’m going to the hot desert to see a really old girl.”

Translation: I’m going to Vegas to see my great-grandmother

Thankfully, the mother driving knew about our upcoming trip and was able to put two and two together. But the funny thng is, Kitten is just as excited about her version of the trip as she was about my version.

So from now on, I think I’ll just stick with the facts – I obviously don’t need to add any bells or whistles to obtain her buy-in. After all, what could be more exciting to a three-year-old than going to a hot desert to see a really old girl?

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Watch Out For the Seeds!

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , , , , , on November 12, 2010 by jrvitalis

Cutting up a watermelon recently, I saw a million little black seeds staring up at me. My first reaction? Shock. I didn’t know they still sold watermelons with seeds in them. My second reaction? Irritation. Why hadn’t the sign at Target indicated that they were not “seedless” watermelons?

Happy to find a good deal on one of my favorite fruits, I had thrown the watermelon in my cart without even considering the fact that the sign hadn’t specifically labeled the watermelon as seedless. After all, it was Target.

A brand I associate with quality, reliability, and above all, convenience.

The whole watermelon incident got me thinking about the importance of branding, and how difficult it is for companies to remain consistent while continually innovating to meet the demands of today’s ever evolving consumer.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Kitten about a year ago:

Pulling into the parking lot of a local sporting goods store, Kitten looked out the window and squealed, “Target!”

“That’s right,” I answered, “but we’re not going to Target right now.”

“Why not?” Kitten asked.

“Because we need groceries, and this isn’t a Super Target. We have to go to the one over by our house to get groceries.”

There was a long pause from the backseat, and then Kitten said, “Huh?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. To me, getting groceries at Target still felt like a relatively new phenomenon, but to Kitten, a Target without groceries was unimaginable.

If Target is going to keep me happy, they have it pretty easy: make sure my watermelon is seedless. But to keep Kitten happy, they’ve got their work cut out for them. I can’t even begin to imagine what goods and services they’ll need to provide to earn her loyalty by the time she’s old enough to have a discretionary income.

Think they’ll be up to the challenge?

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Framing

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , , on November 5, 2010 by jrvitalis

A friend recently shared a story about a rack of bracelets that were for sale in a gift shop. The bracelets, while beautiful, weren’t high-end, so they had been priced reasonably, and were expected to fly off the shelves. They didn’t. Just out of curiosity, the merchant doubled the price. The bracelets sold like crazy!

While this is clearly an issue of pricing, it is also one of framing, or influencing perceptions. The exact same bracelet was perceived as being more desirable because of a higher price tag!

As a parent, I regard framing as one of the most important tools in my kit:

Broccoli? Those aren’t vegetables, they are trees! Who can eat their forest first?

Or

That isn’t a monster on your wall; it’s a fairy princess. You’re so lucky! Not every girl is special enough to have her very own fairy princess watch over her each night.

Unfortunately, my children are not only on to me, but teaching me a few tricks of their own. Here’s a recent conversation with Kitten:

Kitten (to a 3-year-old friend who was riding with us): “That’s a baby car seat!”

Me: “Kitten, I need you to talk to your friends with kindness.”

Kitten (looking at her friend): “I’m not saying you are ugly, I’m just saying that seat is a baby car seat.”

Clearly, this is a girl who knows how to frame a conversation. Did I mention she’s only 3?

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Lemons

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , on July 29, 2010 by jrvitalis

No, I’m not going to give you the song and dance we’ve all heard a million times before: If life gives you lemons, buy lemonade. Interesting, but not relevant to the topic at hand.

Instead, let’s have a pop quiz.

Question: If there are two car dealerships side by side, and they were both selling cars that were identical in every way except one dealer was offering a used-car certification, which car would you buy?

Answer: The certified vehicle, of course.

Why? Because you don’t want to take a chance on the other car being a lemon! This example only becomes interesting when you stop to think about what would happen if we got rid of used-car certifications altogether. How could you buy a used-car from a dealer with any degree of confidence, knowing that if it had problems, you would be stuck with it? Faced with this dilemma, car dealerships would be forced to signal quality in some other manner, perhaps by charging higher prices for vehicles that they felt were of “certifiable quality.”

So, at their core, certifications are really a signal of quality. How does this relate to parenting?

Think about Disney. Why do people spend thousands of dollars to go to Disneyland, or flock to see Disney movies? Because the company has carefully cultivated their brand to signal that they are a premium product.

As a parent, you are faced with a myriad of decisions every day – where will you purchase clothing for your children? Where will you send them to school? Where will you buy their groceries?

Many parents assume that the more they spend on their children, the better quality products they will receive in return. This may or may not be the case. Let’s look at a relatively trivial example: ice cream.

Some people insist on Haagen-Dazs ice cream. Why? Because it’s the best, right? Positioned as a super-premium product, it speaks of a rich European heritage and commands an astronomical price-per-pint. But did you know that there isn’t anything European about Haagen-Dazs? In fact, it was created by a family of Polish immigrants who lived in the Bronx. Trying to differentiate their product, they created an exotic name for their ice cream and priced it far above other ice creams of the era, thereby establishing it as a “super-premium” brand. And the rest is history.

That’s not to say Haagen-Dazs isn’t  a super-premium ice cream (I personally love the stuff), only that we, as consumers, need to be aware of the fact that the “signals” we use to determine quality may or may not be relevant; that is, corporations spend extensive time and energy positioning their products, and they know that relatively simple strategies, such as increasing the price of an item, will position the items as higher-end in the mind of a consumer, regardless of the item’s actual quality or value.

So before you invest in a “brand-name” product, make sure you’ve done your homework and are fully convinced that the premium price-tag comes along with a truly premium product.  

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The Great Cupcake Debacle

Posted in Marketing with tags , , on June 18, 2010 by jrvitalis

In the world of marketing, the importance of knowing your target market can’t be overstated. This holds true of any type of promotional activity, including throwing a birthday party for a three-year-old. You’d think this would be a relatively straight-forward affair, but it turns out that’s not the case.

Take last Friday, for example. I knew it was going to be one of those days when Puppy, Kitten and I gathered in the kitchen to make a batch of cupcakes for Kitten’s birthday party, which was scheduled for 5:00 that afternoon. It wasn’t until we searched the kitchen high and low that I called my husband to ask where he had hidden the bar of unsweetened chocolate I needed for the recipe.

“I didn’t buy a bar,” he said. “The list said unsweetened chocolate, and we have a ton of cocoa powder in the cupboard.”

Since it was raining and he had taken our only car, running to the store for more chocolate wasn’t an option. Rummaging in our cupboards, I came up with a half-eaten bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips. It wasn’t unsweetened chocolate, but it would have to do.

It wasn’t until the girls and I had carefully measured, poured and mixed our way through an entire recipe that I realized I had forgotten to double the recipe for all the ingredients except the chocolate. And with 30 people due to arrive at our house expecting cupcakes in a matter of hours, 16 cupcakes weren’t going to cut it.

Desperate to keep two children (covered head to toe in chocolate and mix) occupied, I handed them the beaters and told them to have at it while I quickly made up a second batch of mix, adding it to the first.

18 minutes later, large, gorgeous, chocolaty cupcakes emerged from our oven. Since this was a new recipe I had pulled from a fancy-schmanzy cupcake book, the girls and I decided we had better sample one. Good thing we did, because they tasted like whole-wheat bran muffins!

With the clock ticking, I went into crisis mode. An hour later, my husband walked in the door carrying a box of store-bought cake mix. Salvation!

Except for the fact that the phone rang right when the timer went off. Shutting off the timer, I sprinted for the phone and forgot all about the cupcakes toasting away in the oven. And I mean toasting.

By the time I remembered the cupcakes 30 minutes later, it was off to the grocery store for my husband to purchase ANOTHER box of cake mix.

80 cupcakes later, I finally had 24 edible, albeit not homemade, cupcakes to serve our guests.

Turns out, all of my efforts were in vain. Most of the children chose the first batch of (supposedly) chocolate cupcakes. Since I let them decorate the cupcakes themselves, most of them stuffed themselves with candy and frosting and never got around to tasting the actual cupcakes!

If I had a better grasp of my target market (in this case, a group of sugar-crazed three-year-olds), I would have saved myself several hours of trouble and served the original cupcakes, regardless of their funky taste!

Other lessons learned?

Always have a back-up plan in place in case things don’t go as expected, and NEVER serve a new recipe to company!

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Get to Know Maslow

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2010 by jrvitalis

After my last posting, Create a Conscious Consumer, I received an e-mail from a fellow CBS alum. Because the commentary was both insightful and thought-provoking, I asked permission to share it with all of you. (Note: due to the length, I’ve condensed the original e-mail):

“A core value of mine is individual liberties … From individual freedoms stems the notion that the government or state-run TV, advertising, marketing powers can’t tell us what to do and not do, short of physically harming others.  This means that much of what is said will be unhealthy … but it also forces us to mature and take care of ourselves … As I raise my [child] … I love instilling critical thinking (the skepticism you mention you see in your little ones)… The world never has been a utopia or nirvana and never will be, and the big game– as I see it– is discovering who you can be freely…”

This commentary raises a myriad of interesting and important discussions, as well as underscores the importance of providing our children with a tool box to navigate the world around them. Since this topic keeps popping up, I think it would be useful take a look at exactly where this process of teaching our children to recognize and evaluate information falls within the continuum of social and psychological development.

I first encountered Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” in a marketing class at CBS. The theory was presented as a pyramid designed to illuminate the stages we, as human beings, must pass through in order to reach self-actualization. At the bottom of the pyramid rest our most basic physical needs: food, clothing and shelter. As we move up the pyramid, we reach more complex and esoteric needs – the need for safety and security, the need to form meaningful relationships, and toward the top, self-esteem and self- actualization. According to Maslow, the needs at the bottom of the pyramid must be met before an individual can progress up the pyramid to less fundamental needs (from a survival perspective).

Although designed as a theoretical framework, Maslow’s hierarchy can serve as a useful roadmap for dealing with our children on a day-to-day basis.

Take Kitten, for example. I’m currently in the basement using the electronic babysitter so I can get this posting completed (in my defense, the girls are watching an education video as part of Puppy’s curriculum!). In any case, Kitten is in the process of working herself into a frenzy because I won’t give her a snack. Despite the fact that I’ve explained at least fourteen times that we will be eating dinner in a matter of minutes, her tantrum continues to escalate.

Enter Maslow. According to his framework, I am – right at this very moment – failing to meet Kitten’s basic needs. He would likely argue that her growling stomach anchors her at the bottom of the pyramid, rendering her incapable of rational thought.

On a macro level, this serves as a reminder that it is our task as parents to ensure that our children’s basic needs are met so that we can focus on the top end of Maslow’s pyramid, thereby giving us the opportunity to engage in discussions about conscious consumerism and the importance of protecting their civil liberties.

For now, I guess I’d better get to work on dinner.

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Create a Conscious Consumer

Posted in Marketing with tags , , , , on March 8, 2010 by jrvitalis

As a marketing student at CBS, I struggled with the ethics of marketing, and advertising in particular. Was it really right, I wondered, to put pictures of cartoon characters on the front of sugar-filled cereal boxes? Or to use scantily clad teenagers to promote clothing lines? Or to airbrush models to “correct” their “flaws” on the covers of magazines?

When I asked one of my professors to help come to terms with this dichotomy, he helped me reframe the issue. In its purest form, he explained, advertising is a process by which companies help consumers identify solutions for their needs. Hairy legs? You need a razor! Hungry? We sell food!

Fair enough. I, for one, love it when I am introduced to a product that fills a need in my life.

But what about those other ads? You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones that try to sell me something I don’t even want, much less need. Rather than providing useful information, these types of ads seem to be designed to create a sense of inadequacy so that their product can fill our (newly identified) “void”.  For example, I’m cruising through my day feeling pretty good about life when BOOM! I see an ad for perfume. There’s an impossibly thin, yet voluptuous ,drop-dead gorgeous, scantily-clad woman wrapped in the embrace of a man who just stepped off the cover of a Harlequin Romance. I can’t help but notice that I’m not as tall as her. Or as thin. Or as pretty. Or as fashionable. Wow! All the sudden, I realize how woefully inadequate I really am. Maybe her perfume will help me feel better.

OK, hopefully you are all rolling your eyes right about now. We’re all a little more savvy than that. We know that buying a bottle of perfume (or air freshner, or a new car, or whatever) isn’t really going to solve our problems.

We know that. But what about our children? As a parent, one of the most valuable tools we can give our children is to teach them to become a conscious consumer. In order to do that, we need to help our children develop an (age-appropriate) awareness of the messages they are receiving, and start giving them the tools they need to learn to process these messages.

In our house, we rarely watch television, but when we do, I make a conscious effort to watch the advertisements with Puppy and Kitten. We often talk about the ads – what kind of products they are selling, and what kind of message the ads are sending.

Does this mean my daughters are going to grow up free of the negative messages they are exposed to on a regular basis? Not likely. But a few months ago when Puppy saw an advertisement for fast food flash across the television screen, she looked at me and said, “I know they are just trying to trick me into wanting that so they can have my money.”

I was at once proud of her insight, and terrified that I’d created a cynical little human being, unable to trust the world around her.

It’s a balancing act, but I think in the long run teaching my daughter to become a conscious consumer is going to pay off. And who knows, maybe someday she’ll even major in marketing. :)

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