╠ Victoria Burns, Samboy Earns ╣

Some of you have probably seen the Samboy is Back facebook group for donating to the bushfire appeal. When Samboy started this group I doubt they would have believed this could ever be so successful. The idea itself is one you would never really believe to be all that successful. Basically come Feb 15th whatever group has the most members hilst having 'Samboy is back' in the title wins $10,000 and a bunch of chips.

One user took this as an opportunity to start a group that will donate the money to the bushfire appeal and within days has 50,000+ members. If this group wins then basically Samboy has inadvertently donated $10,000 to a current hot appeal while probably getting a return equal to if that amount was spent on advertising. In just this group alone they've paid less than 20c per person to see the 'samboy is back tagline' and this is without factoring in any other groups created in this competition that has been open for months. It's odd to think that something like this could turn what seems like a not too optimistic campaign into a hugely succesful one.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is what companies would do to promote their donations. Companies as a whole are soulless and only interested in doing things for profit so I was thinking of the best way to donate whilst making it known that you are giving without wasting money on advertising that could go to the donation. The two chain supermarkets have taken two different approaches.

Woolworths gave a cool $1 million off the bat, whilst Coles is donating a day of profit. You have the woolworths option which is most likely known by little more than the staff themselves whilst Coles is common knowledge and has facebook groups and the such as well as causing people to use Coles services for the day. Personally I doubt the profit donated will probably be as high as woolworths yet Coles have built a lot of brand equity.

Whilst it technically is not really the point of donating to get a little back but when it comes down to it why not get a little back, be it the Facebook Samboy group leader getting to keep the samboy chips for her gracious donation or Brands ssimply getting recognized for their donation. Don't just donate, donate smart because not only does it promote you but it promotes the appeal itself which encourages more donation. It's win win.

╠ Insight - Woolworths Credit Card ╣

Intro
When I was first getting into the marketing blog scene I noticed that everyone took a sort of different approach to what I did. Everyone else focused more on insights on any form of marketing. I avoided this because I never suspected myself to have insight on such things. However today I found myself actually pondering something worthy of such a blog and figured it was worth putting here. I think this is all more of a frame of mind, if you keep your mind open to such things they are all around, and the more I involve myself in this hopefully the more insights I will have. Anyway on with the insight.

As some of you may know I work for Dick Smith Electronics, which is a subdivision of Woolworths. Overall my opinion of Woolworths has been quite low with my dealings inside the business. They don't take care of their staff overly well. However their new venture in that of the credit card.

The first thing that has to be pointed out about the credit card is that it is in no way a supermarket trying to become a bank. In fact the card itself is linked to HSBC so they aren't actually taking care of that side.

The power in this card is the market research that will now be at Woolworths fingertips. From every sale at their store they will be able to track everything that you buy on the card which allows customer tracking like never before. In the past you could always see what someone was buying but now you can track that same consumer unobtrusively.

Visit Frequency
From this card you can track regularity of visits, you can find which people return each week, people who return only for certain sales, people who only shop when the weather is nice, people who shop determined on how much they bought in their previous shop etc. Of course all of this depends on having brand loyalty to woolworths. However woolworths are offering double points on when you shop with them and triple if you buy their products which is quite an incentive which itself helps for that loyalty.

Purchase tracking
Also with each visit you can keep tracking items which people buy and as such develop the lists of what items consist of that customers staples and what are irregular purchases. This could be incredibly useful for working out sales or just base prices.

Say you value Tim Tams at $2 and will buy them only when at or below this price and lets assume that's below their normal cost. By repeated sales eventually Woolworths would be able to discover this. Now say their are 100,000 people out there that have varying levels of what they value tim tams at. From this Woolworths could discover the perfect sale amount in order to sell the exact amount they want and get the highest price to do so. Including this with the previous ability to determine when people shop and you just have to start wondering just how much control the consumer has on their actions and how much power this market research can have on people.

Woolworths have the power to control peoples sales unlike any other competitor in the Australian market. With this they can set their base prices, sales value and time with incredible effectiveness.

That being said this is only if they utilize this. As I said before I don't have the greatest respect for them, however the potential here is amazing, and as such I hope they do use it. Anyway I hope I've put forward my excitement about the possibilities that this card represents and somehow at least intrgiued a few of you.

Other Gruen News
Now back onto the normal stuff. I'm really busy this coming week with assignments as well as Manifest stuff so the Commonwealth breakdown may still be delayed a bit but I now have the Sony ad to do after that and now here's a new series of ads to vote on for after these two. The choices are as follows

Optus - End of Time (Advert with various clocks lacking time and an elephant for some reason)

Birdseye - Exaggerator (Mates eating chips discussing getting back from a footy match with one hugely exaggerating everything)

Vodafone - Take Everything With you (Guy getting ready to leave folds up his life and puts it in his pocket)

Votes are heavily appreciated. Also if you have any comments on anything just leave them below. Once again thankyou all for your time.