dslgem.com

Oxo have decided to launch an X shaped cube in a distinctive beef flavour in a £2 million campaign which is said to be the biggest marketing campaign the company has done.

Oxo has had sales grow by 3% to over £38 million in the last year.

The idea behind the X shaped cube is to appeal to the younger market following recent make overs of Mr Kipling and Hovis who are part of the premier foods brand.

In 1910 the Oxo brand was launched after a German Chemist found a way to extract large amounts of beef extracts from carcasses.

The Oxo cube was sent out to british troops in the first world war and between 1914-1918 over 100 million of them were consumed.

Lets just hope this is a continued success with its bold new look

Marketers need to sell products and consumers are expecting the products to get better and better. Often this is  done with  flashy but useless additions which are fluff but offer no real benefit. As a case in point, we have a new kettle in the office which  illuminates the water with a fancy blur light when you switch it on. What is the purpose of this other than a marketing gimmick? Think about it. Why? It is not to tell you the kettle is on because it still makes a noise as the water is boiling and steam comes out the top?

Some people might say it is the design. What drives the development of these things? The answer is technology. Have you noticed how most electronic devices now have blue LEDs? Before that they were green and years before that they were red only. The reason is that it was difficult to make LEDs in any other  colour. LEDs are not the same as light bulbs. Their colour is determined by the properties of the semiconductor materials used to make them. New materials such as GaN have allowed blue LEDs to manufactured. In the past blue LEDs were not available and so subliminally  blue lights are  distinctive and make the product stand out as modern over the boring, green and old fashioned red LEDs.  That is why there is trend for  blue lights; advertising marketing gone mad.

It has just been announced that Microsoft and Yahoo will be joining forces. The agreement means that the Microsoft search engine will power Yahoo and Yahoo will sell advertisements on its advertising network for both companies.  Together they may have the power to take on Google. Combined, this will give them 30% of the search market. In any case the partnership is expected to bring in an extra $500 million. The contract is for 10-years.

With Google having a whooping 60% of the market can this merger have a significant effect?

By sheer coincidence, my annoying Google capture came up with:

Talks between Microsoft and Yahoo have begun again. Yahoo and Microsoft are likely to pool their reasources to gain market share of the advertising revenue. The partnership would see Microsoft displaying adverts for both parties on its search engine Bing while Yahoo would take over display advertising sales. Nothing has been settled so far and the partnership may not materialise.

Individually, their market share is such that they lack the reach required to achieve a good revenue  for their advertising services. Yahoo’s U.S. search market share is 19.8 percent while Microsoft’s is 8.4 percent (according to comScore) compared with Google’s 65 percent.

It is often said that in an economic depression marketers will still spend money on advertising products.  However does this agree with the facts? With the continued growth of the internet digital marketing and spending on SEO seem set to increase but this is because it is a growing market, more people will find themselves connected to the internet and the convenience it offer will undoubtedly lead to greater online sales.

However, this must be tempered by the fact that people have lower disposable incomes meaning they will be less willing to spend. Marketing budgets suffer from a time lag and so while the rest of the economy is in the grips of a depression, marketers have escaped relatively unscathed so far.

In times of  economic gloom, marketing is one of the first areas to be cut. It is a way of making quick short term savings. In the long term however, this can severely hurt future sales.

The expected outcome is a decreasing in the spending on traditional marketing but a small increase in digital marketing budget as companies try and achieve greater targeting for their products.

The BBC is a trustworthy organisation, people believe what it has to say in general. While looking for a completely unrelated issue I noticed an advertisement for weight loss. It looks spammy but the addition of the BBC’s logo gives it a certain click worthiness that is likely to make people click on the ad. For me, I just wanted to see in what way had this been seen on the BBC? (I was thinking BBC Watchdog.)

When you click on the site it takes you to a splog: (http://www-janesweightlossblog-com/)

I don’t want to give them a link so if you want to visit the site then replace the dashes with dots.

The reference to the BBC seems to be a general news story about acai berries. This is very low spammy site and links to an equally spammy marketing of quick-fix remedies. If you end up buying anything from this site then you are an idiot.

There is no secret to weight loss. Eat less high calorie foods and exercise more.

Since the introduction of the character, “Aleksandr Orlov” a Russian Meerkat who is trying in vain to make peoples aware that his website, comparethemeerkat.com is not the same as the comparison website comparethemarket.com enquires at comparethemarket.com has increased by  80%. An undoubted success and it shows that the marketers at VCCP have done a good job.

In the new advert, the billionaire meerkat is still trying to end people to the correct website but this time through the medium of puppet theatre. Will it have the same level of success or will peoples tire of this character? Simples.

For compare the meerkats goto http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/my-tv-ads

Using the web for recreational purposes  is set to overtake traditional broadcast television within the next 14 months according to  Microsoft. This result is released in a document, “Europe Logs On: Internet Trends of Today and Tomorrow“.

In 2008, on average people used the web for 8.9 hours per week and 11.5 hours per week watching television . In 2010,  the average number of hours for is estimated at 14.2 hours per week for internet and 11.5 hours per week for television.  Using the current trends, web use will overtake television viewing for the first time in June, 2010.

On the interent, the most frequent destinations are portals to other content such as news, gossip, shopping and communication, e.g. Yahoo. Instant messaging services were also popular as were entertainment and games web sites.

Before the recession there was a trend toward people buying ethical products and no-where was this trend more marked than in the food industry. Remember the empty shelves as people clambered to buy free-range chicken. Fair-trade products also grew in their influence as people had money to spare.

As the recession bites, resulting in people losing their jobs, disposable income decreases and the take-up of these more expensive products declines. It is not rocket science.

The figures bare this out. A survey by conducted by Lightspeed on behalf of strategic marketing PR firm Cohn & Wolfe asked 1005 consumers  showed that 73% of consumers will seek to find cheaper goods in the future.

Additional evidence is provided by the shopping statistics for UK organic food which declined by 1.7% following a steady increase over the past decade.

In a bid to save money consumers are turning increasingly to discount stores such as Aldi and Lidl.