Lamb Chapter 9 Web Exercise
Product Concepts
Vignette: McDonald's is looking for ways to market products that appeal to health-conscious customers. Co-branding with Healthy Choice may accomplish this objective.
Featured URLs:
In the Fast Lane
Whether you like fast food or not, you are surely aware of this market. The products we typically associate with McDonald's are burgers, fries, and pop. Over the years, however, this chain has developed any number of other items. At one point, pizzas were on the menu. As noted in this chapter's vignette, wrapped sandwiches have been another product. The latter have been targeted to more health-conscious customers.
Co-branding: Transferring What Works for One to Another
In the Resources section you will find listed five fast food restaurants as well as five companies that focus on providing healthy food products. You are going to develop a co-branding strategy. For each pair of sites, you'll have two ideas to describe.
Start with McDonald's and Healthy Choice. Look for ideas on the McDonald's site that might enhance the Healthy Choice site. Then look for ideas on the Healthy Choice site that might benefit the McDonald's site. Give one example for each, stating what you think would work well for each site as "borrowed" from the other site. For example, you might want to take the concept of Ronald McDonald to suggest a similar "fun" character to add to the authoritative personalities on Healthy Choice (nutritionist and chef). And you might want to take the idea of fitness tips from Healthy Choice to enhance the McDonald's site.
Continue on through the table below, pair by pair, in the same manner.
Branding Articles
These Web Exercises provide an additional opportunity for exploration of Chapter 9.
1. A-Branding- Read "The Brand Called You."
- List qualities or characteristics that distinguish you (as a marketer)
from your classmates.
- What have you done this week to make yourself stand out?
- What would your fellow students say is your greatest and clearest
strength?
- What is your most noteworthy personal trait?
- Compare brand You and brand X, and list the features or benefits you offer that brand X does not. Every feature that you offer and they don't (or that they offer and you don't) should<yield an identifiable benefit for the customer or client.
1. B-More about Brands
- Expand your knowledge about brands by reading the articles linked to "How to Build a Digital Brand." What ideas do these give you?
- Try your hand at some of the games offered in the "Build Brand You" article. Which one do you think is most effective? Explain.
3. TrademarksTry modifying a product by changing the packaging. Using ideas from the fast food sites, modify two products found on the healthy foods sites to make them more appealing to the school-age fast food customers.
Looking through the sites listed earlier, choose a product that you think could be promoted to the point of becoming a master brand (like Jello or Crayola). Design a new trademark that could help move the product in this direction.
