Last night I saw “The Joneses” which is a new movie about a family that seems picture perfect on the outside. It turns out that they are actually a hired team of marketers who will go to great lengths to sell luxury items to an upscale neighborhood. I think everyone should go see this movie because of its relevance to our class. It is all about the power of word of mouth. The family literally wears the brands they need to sell, say a few words about what they are wearing to their potential or “target” audience, and before you know it, the whole town has whatever items the Joneses have. These marketers were spreading WOM and making their consumers unbelievably happy. One happy customer would run off and tell the other that they needed to buy a certain item. The movie did make me question the virtue of selling and advertising in general. It’s scary to think how far marketers could go to sell their product. To actually impersonate a rich family in order to sell brands was something I never even thought could happen. I know this was a movie, but it made me wonder if anyone in the real world has done something like this before. Anyway, everyone should go see the movie or read more about it online!

http://www.thejonesesmovie.com/gallery.html

The clothing store H&M is in it’s third season or raising funds for Fashion Against Aids. This year, the store has decided to cast well-known runway and editorial model Josh Beech to be the face of this season’s campaign. In conjunction with the editorial campaign, H&M is launching its first festival collection, with 25% of all sales going directly to youth HIV/AIDS awareness projects. The campaign involves many designers and celebrities who have done a variety of PSA-style videos, as well as designed a wide variety of awareness-related promotional items such as t-shirts and bags. I love this ad campaign because I feel like H&M does really care about HIV/AIDS awareness and they are able to help involve consumers who would not necessarily give to this kind of charity by using high profile people, making beautiful, fashion-forward campaigns, and selling affordable, stylish clothing to the masses.

To look at what H&M has done in past seasons for this charity please check out these links below:
http://www.hm.com/us/press/pressreleases/fashion__prfashion.nhtml

This ad is shocking. It’s pretty depressing to see how people destroy themselves. But I guess the shock factor is sometimes required to make a lasting impression in the audience. It’s like the Truth campaign against smoking (by Arnold and CP+B), better give shocking images and facts than taking this horrible subject in a light way.

I call them people instead of customers, because you don’t actually pay to use Google. I use gmail and this morning, all of the vowels were missing from the site. I mean all of them. I sure this will be fixed by the time you have read this, but its kind of funny. You can’t send an email with vowels, you can’t read anything with vowels, and its a bit confusing. Of course, there’s a link on the homepage explaining the “vowel outage”. If you read it, you will see how good of a job Google does at recognizing problems, connecting with their users, and explaining what they know. I think its really cool and sheds some light on why and how Google is so successful.