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Showing posts from July, 2007

Dress ed to Kill

He is 25 years old. He dropped out of Princeton University and now he is turning “worm-poop” into green bucks! Tom Szaky and his friend Jon Beyer started a company called TerraCycle Inc. The company uses worm waste to create plant food and the best part is it sells it in recycled soda bottles. Most of these plastic bottles are collected through a nation-wide recycling programme organised by the company itself. It’s got schools and churches to collect empty plastic bottles and milk cartons, which are used to package its products. They now even have neck-tags on these recycled bottles where you can put your first name and the state from where you collected your bottle. It’s this idea of such an innovative packaging that generated copious publicity for this company that it has hardly spent on advertising. It even showed what the company believed in and stood for. Body Shop had done a similar thing years ago. They encouraged customers to bring their old packaging back into the shop to be r

Think Pink (Marketing to Women)

Men may be from Mars, but smart marketers now know that it is the species from Venus that calls the shots in purchase decisions... The year was 1929. The man was called Edward L. Bernay, considered by many as the father of public relations. The Easter parade was about to be staged on Fifth Avenue. This was also the era when women did not smoke much in public. Before the parade, Bernay alerted the newspaper that women would be smoking in public to promote ‘equality of sexes”. Suddenly, everyone was excited & wanted to cover the event. What Bernay told no one was the simple fact that he had been paid for this effort by American Tobacco, the maker of Lucky Strike in their effort to encourage women to smoke. It was one of the most famous marketing moments of its time. Recently Dell’s marketing representatives met Oprah and showcased their products on her show. Its Pocket DJ and 30 inch LCD TV featured on Oprah’s Favourite Things 2004 shopping list. About 70% of Dell’s plasma sets were