Cute Anime Rice? Only in Japan!

Following up a post from Matt's blog, using anime characters to promote a company has been a common practice in Japan to quite a few companies. Since I'm an avid follower of the Japanese culture (especially subculture), I decide to dedicate the next few blogpost in talking about marketing for Japan subculture.

Take a look at this rice company.

Just with the addition of having a cute anime character in the packaging has increased the exposure of the brand and the company reportedly having a huge spike of sales . As quoted "Sales of the rice, which is mostly done through mail order, reached over 2,500 individual orders in the first month of sale, totaling 30 tons worth of the 5kg and 10kg packages." And this campaign has been going on for some time.

For a simple explanation, by the addition of having that in the packaging it creates a sort of 'novelty' feel to the item. Fans would like to associate themselves with those characters and thus willing to spend money to get it.

Although myself argue that it reduces the potential target market to a niche market or in retrospect it is good especially if the company's objective is to target the niche market.

I myself don't see myself eating a bag of rice with a picture of an anime character on the package.

Google Ad sense

Well, just because I can I decided to ad a Google Ad Sense to my blog.

So forgive me if the blog page is cluttered up with random advertising.

Oh and of course an e-Cookie for those who clicked on the advertising ^^

Blackle?

Recently I came across this website called blackle.

http://blackle.com

It is essentially Google with a black screen. The theory is that by making the computer use black light instead of white light, it will reduce the energy usage of the computer by a certain amount.

Now back to our normal web activities, what web page do we most often used. Why hello there Facebook.

Facebook's default page is blue banner on top, and the rest is white. White is used because its a neutral color so that colors can just blend in easily.

Just to spark a thought, what if Facebook has an option to make its page black instead of white (or a darker shade of white) in order to conserve energy, would it be accepted well by the users?Knowing that most consumers lately are getting bombarded by 'Green' efforts by companies.

I know as a marketing student that it would be bad for companies using Facebook because black doesn't really allow products to be advertised on Facebook. But as a consumer, what do you think?

Mentos Cola - an Explosive Paradox?

When you were a bit younger (or bored) have you heard the joke about mixing Cola and Mentos to produce a hillarious explosion. I don't want to go to details of how that is possible - other than it is apparently possible. There are tons of youtube experiments an

d even TV shows like Mythbusters has proven how hillarious the explosion is.

The good marketing people in Mentos discovered a use for the association between Mentos and cola and they have released a new product based on these two things.

Say hello to Mentos Cola. The explosive cola hit.

I am not going to comment about how the product is going to be succesful or not or how they are using the explosive association to draw the connection to the brand to create a brand awareness. I don't want to put that in my mouth for fear of my gut exploding.

From hillarious experiment to a new product launch. Comment.

Post 3 - Death of Free Stuffs?

I don't know about you, but I'm annoyed at the recent shutting down of one of the largest free manga reading website on the internet. Even though for those who know how to use it its a major annoyance, but for some who don't know how to you can say goodbye to reading free mangas online (hint: go to the scanslation website and then read it or download it from them). One of the reason they shut it down was because publisher's starting to get annoyed at all the users (read: cheap bastards like us) reading manga for free on websites and not paying a single cent.

If you're like me and paying attention to online distributions of mangas and animes, it is noticeable that there are conflicts between fansubs (awesome people who scans and translates for our benefit) and licensees (bad people who purchased the series commercially and then own the license to distribute it).

Now taking the context out of this debacle - it is a growing concern between the free users and

big businesses that wants our hard earned money for those. Usually involving musics, films, books,etcs.

It is not only for mangas, businesses are now protecting their intellectual property on free sharing websites such as youtube. A few years ago, if you would youtube a movie for example you can view a movie for free without paying a cent. But nowadays, even if you use a soundtrack for a movie, advertising or even music tracks without acknowledging the company that owns it can get your videos taken down.

While I know that this debacle has been going on for some time, it has just hit me hard lately because of essentially a big business is attacking fan based community that helps out other people in the community.

Invasion of free rights? Or is it a necessary way for businesses to protect their share of the consumer market?

The once great website:

http://onemanga.com

Post 2 LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT YOUR BLOG! IM ON A BLOG!

IM ON A HORSE!
LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT YOUR MAN!

I'm pretty sure you've heard of this particular advertising on the internet. It is now almost an internet
phenomenon, ranging from video spoofs, image macros and even ranging from internet memes.

Here's one

The success of this particular advertising is because it is designed as a viral advertising, it is all over social media networking site such as youtube, facebook, Twitter, Reddit.

But is it a popular only as a meme or is it an actual advertising success?

The advertising has earned a success at Cannes ad festival - showing that is is indeed a success as an advertising.

As a final note, do you think that advertising nowadays to be succesful needs to be on social media sites? Or a viral advertising is only as a means of promotion stunt?

Post 1 - I Love Marketing or How I Need to Make this Blogpost in Order to Pass the Unit

So instead of a hassle of making a new blog just to do this subject, I'll just use my old blog site to do this assignment.

It is now my final semester of my marketing degree, and I am taking this unit - MKF 3881 - Electronic Marketing aka eMarketing.

It is a part of the final marking criteria for one of my assignment is that I need to make a blog post regarding eMarketing at least once per week (so that's at least 10 posts) which will be graded 12 weeks from now to form part of my assignment marks.

So what is this going to be? Well - for those who are not familiar with eMarketing it is "The use of information, communication technologies to understand, create, communicate and deliver value to customers and the organisation". Uh, technical terms, gotta love 'em.

For starters - I'm assuming all of you have Facebook and there you go, that is one of the largest social site in the world now.

I am going to take a bit of my own personal viewpoints for some of these posts, the posts are going to be the stuffs I'm interested in so pardon me if I am a bit geeky in some of these posts. But yeah - enjoy - it is going to be (hopefully) interesting, and I'm expecting feedbacks.