After three weeks of stress, debates, learning and trials and errors, the AdWords campaign is finally over. Our results, though resulting in over 1,000 clicks leave me with a sort of bitter taste in terms of our Click-Through-Rates (just 0.22%). The reason? Our graphs show we could have done better with our last week even having a CTR of 1.83%. Of course every end is a chance for reflection, so here it goes: What could we have done different? Probably many things that I will discuss in some future posts. Before I do that, let me introduce you to my team and our project. We are a group of six international students studying Marketing Science at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. My team is not particularly Internet savvy and online marketing is a topic we preach, yet seldom [...]

One of the strongest brand communities in the business world is that of Harley Davidson. Every respectable Harley Davidson owner has participated or dreams of participating in a Posse ride. You might wonder why that is. Well, to start with, the rides are excellent ways of discovering the USA. The long rides explore the country in depth and give participants the chance to explore various landscapes, hidden parts of the USA or legendary roads and broaden their horizons. Moreover, what better way of interacting with people that share your love and passion for Harley Davidson than to be surrounded by them during a long, difficult ride? The rides offer customers the thrills and excitement associated with biking over long distances, with unpredictable weather conditions, changing [...]

Imagine this: you are a 20-something fashion addict studying marketing & being told the following: "For your final project, you need to pick a well-known brand you like and design a marketing campaign targeting a different market segment than its current one".. what is your natural choice? After a brief brainstorming session with my team (Andreea Dicu & Raquel Gonzales Martin) discussing cosmetics for men, Red Bull for kids (evil, I know), and green fast food, we came up with the perfect idea: what if we designed a new Zara clothing line for curvy women? And perfect it was. Zara stands for fashionable clothes, trendy colors, and feminine cuts, promising to deliver fashion for a moderate price, adapting runway trends for the streets, while maintaining a customer-focused [...]

Did you ever order a Bacardi Coke, a Red Bull Cola, ate the McFlurry M&M at McDonalds, thought about buying your Jimmy Choo shoes at H&M or your Sergio Rossi ones at PUMA? Then you already have an idea of what co-marketing is: a branding technique that has been around for the past 20 years that simply consists of presenting two or more brands simultaneously to the consumer. Joint branding is quite popular, at an average of 40% growth per year (1994 data), but of course rather complex to manage and, if not implemented correctly, can have dire negative consequences, such as brand dilution or failure of the parent brand. Back in 1998, Simonin & Ruth asked some very basic questions about the effects of these brand alliances: how do they affect the individual brands? How are [...]

2010 seems to be a year filled with many exciting projects for me. One of my first is being a team leader for the Google Online Marketing Challenge for my Account Management class. I have to say I was rather excited in the beginning as I know that online marketing & advertising have quite a bright future with an increasing number of companies seeing them as a cheap alternative to traditional campaigns. The GOMC is a nice way of promoting Google's own services by getting university students to find a business that they are interested in and promoting it via AdWords with a set $200 budget during a 3-week campaign. Who gets what out of it? Google gets some insight into how its customers can use AdWords to maximize a company's ROI and proves that great results can be achieved even with a [...]