On a recent visit to Takashimaya Shopping Centre for Christmas shopping, my family visited their highly popular basement food mall area looking for gift ideas.
Amidst the festive air, I noticed that there were many stalls offering gourmet food items for sale where the delectable pastries and candies were made ‘live’ by chefs.
One of the most important chapters in the book of marketing is customer segmentation and targeting. You need to know who you’re reaching and how you’re making your product or service relevant to their needs, wants or desires. Without a keen understanding of your target segment, everything else may fall apart.
The challenge however is this. How do you know who they really are?
“Brand extensions refers to the use of a successful brand name to launch new or modified products in a same broad market“ while “brand stretching refers to the use of an established brand name for products in unrelated markets“.
Anybody following the global technology market would know how brutal it is. Battles for distribution channels, platform acceptance, supply chain efficiencies, and brand leadership have led to the spilling of blood on both Wall Street and Main Street. This has led to companies merging, being acquired, ousting their CEOs, or stopping their product lines altogether in desperate bids to survive and thrive.
Against such a backdrop, PC companies can ill afford to focus purely on features and benefits when marketing their electronic wares. They need to connect more deeply and resonate emotionally with their target audiences. Cool designs, functional specifications, and state-of-the-art features can be so easily copied that PC makers need to dig deeper.
Good storytelling helps to sustain consumer interest (Universal Studios Singapore’s Madagascar Crate Ride)
One of the greatest challenges faced by theme parks, zoos, museums, and other visitor attractions is that of getting one’s visitors to keep returning. While adding new rides, exhibits and enclosures can help to draw repeat patronage, their prohibitively high costs make such strategies unfeasible over the short term.
What then should one do to renew one’s product and keep guests coming back?
In a leisure world dominated by American brands like Disney and Universal Studios, Ocean Park has distinguished itself year after year.
Thanks to my colleagues from the Association of Singapore Attractions (ASA), I had the privilege to learn how Hong Kong’s Ocean Park managed to hold its ground against HK Disneyland.
In its simplest and most basic form, there are four things that we need to take note of when rolling out any marketing strategy. This can be represented by the acronym TART as a yummy mnemonic device.