Social Listening

I have recently been hearing about MoonPie's Twitter account and decided to look into it. I've heard from a number of different people that they have created a cult like following on the social media platform and I was curious as to what made them so entertaining that they stood out on a site that specializes in that.
      MoonPie is a company a company that really simply sells MoonPies, a delicious graham and marshmallow sandwich dipped in flavoring. They seem to be well loved or hated but not much inbetween.

   It's clear that people are opinionated about MoonPies being both good and/or bad, but what has made this exceptional is not really that they are just selling MoonPies, it has become that they are selling their brand. It became clear to MoonPie that they had been around for over 100 years, they were not releasing new products, not redesigning, other people could sell the same product, and all in all, they were not changing. So rather than re-engineering their whole business, they decided to sell their brand rather than their product. To do this, they needed to make their brand marketable and they went to the Tombras Group and social media manager Patrick Wells in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began crafting for them a brand that was, in short, personable. You can see how just through the few tweets I included that they turned their social media presence into a very human, sassy, funny and down to earth feel. They turned their business into a likeable business by really telling a story on their Twitter account. They told the story of a quippy, clever, and sometimes lonely but nonetheless honest, and human brand. They showed themselves to be a true purple cow in the midst of a dairy farm of blah corporate twitter accounts. The company responded in both kind and harsh ways to customers but without fail, in a funny or clever way. And it worked! People began loving the MoonPie brand and they exploded in followers and retweets. Although unorthodox it seems to be the boost that this brand needed and I have to admit, I would love to think that if I were brand manager, I would have made the same call. I love this style of marketing and in a 100 year old company that hasn’t changed as long as it’s been around and is unwilling to rebrand in any orthodox way, this approach seems perfect. It fit them like a glove and I have learned that although most handbooks would shy away from such a risk, sometimes risky is really genuinely the only safe thing to do. 

Marketing in the News

     I originally saw this article from Forbe’s and it caught my eye with the title “The Future of Small Business Marketing.” Seeing as I am planning on owning my own small business, this piqued my interest. I know my father who currently runs the business, has no website, no social media, no marketing at all and I hope to help by changing that. The author, T. Maxwell simply divulges some helpful tips for small business owners to take simple steps towards successful marketing. He first recommends redesigning your website. It is critical to have a website that is both easy to navigate, and guides your visitors towards action points while maintaining aesthetic quality. He recommends having a professional do this to save you both time and eventually money as it proves more effective through their expertise. Next, he recommends understanding your local SEO or search engine optimization. I believe especially for the business my family is in, this is critical. If we can’t make it into the top 5 for local searches of our service, I believe we face extinction in the years to follow. Lastly, Maxwell suggests turning your advertising campaign over entirely to a professional. He points out that as the business owner, what you do best if run your business and there are very reliable and effective agencies out there that are professionals in running advertising for good reason.

                Maxwell is ultimately vying for the advertising giant relatively new on the scene, eMaximize in Los Angeles. Their value proposition is in providing expert digital marketing services to small businesses. To elaborate more, Maxwell really focuses on a problem faced by many existing small business owners. They are working from outdated, often analog systems for everything, especially marketing. Simultaneously, 66% of millennials say that they would like to start their own business and will be entering the competition with other outdated advertisers, understanding the importance of digital marketing. Maxwell proposes businesses like eMaximize as a viable and strong solution. While business owners rarely have time to invest in things like starting websites or managing social media, there are businesses that specialize in doing just that and they will understand the nuances even better than the competition. Ultimately this makes it worth the chunk in the budget. I think of companies like my father’s in the small town of Roseburg in the custom cabinetry business. He is not alone in this field and faces a lot of competition. However, he does not have a website, social media profile, billboard or anything. Even worse, because he is so busy keeping up with the work flow, he has no time to put effort into marketing. I think this marketing approach uniquely fits businesses in his situation. I think they did a great job in using this article to, in living color, point out the problem small businesses face in a world that has shifted and continues to shift towards digital marketing. If I was the brand product manager selling this service, I think it would have gone a long way to include several testimonials and real world examples to cement people’s ideas of this company’s effectivity. I think in this article, the marketing approach for this service was great. Their location in Forbe’s where they know small business owners turn for advice and solutions was key. They did lack in selling why they do what they do. They made a great case for the what of their business but didn’t so much as list one value of their business when I think it would have gone a long way for them to even say something about their commitment to supporting small business owner’s has driven them to create this product. I really learned that for me, as I head into the business world, owning my own business, that it can be highly valuable to have at least pieces of my marketing done by professionals.

Link to article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/01/14/the-future-of-small-business-marketing/#2e054841649b

Link to eMaximize: https://emaximize.com/

This Is Me

      Hello to whom it my concern! As you have figured out by now, my name is Gage Reeves and I am in a marketing class. That comes as a direct result of where I'm heading in life right now. To take you back a bit, I was born and raised in good old Roseburg, a small town of about 20,000 in southern Oregon. My father has been an entrepreneur as long as he has been working and he faithfully instilled that same skill set and passed on that same love to me. The name of the game is high-end custom cabinetry and I've been working with him in it for about the last decade. I feel like I'm doing what I'm meant to do when I get to take a dream in someone's mind and make it a reality with my own two hands. There's a beauty and kind of art to working with wood to turn a house into a home with someone's dream kitchen, office, dinner table, armoire or you name it. This summer we built someone a coffee table with a secret compartment and magnetic catch, and he teared up he was so happy. So I'm here at school partially because with my scholarships, I can get a four year degree in business administration with no debt and partially to really understand business better and get the skill set to take my father's business into the 21st century as I hopefully carry on the legacy. In this class in particular, I am excited to learn really anything about marketing. My father has carried our business for the last 20 years on nothing but word or mouth, never having a website, phone number, billboard, newspaper ad, or so much as business card. I know that with sustained quality, we can take steps to wisely market our business and increase our customer base. I am most excited about seeing how marketing can help small business like mine.
     Outside of all this however, life keeps me busy. I am president at Antioch house, the Christian fraternity in town, I'm engaged to the love of my life, I hike, play soccer, work at the one and only G3 Sports and Fitness, drink too much coffee, read too many books, and ride motorcycles. I own a particular kind of motorcycle that is designed to be on road and off road. Me and my dad have been doing this together for a few years now, where we have found a way to combine our love for camping in the woods, and riding motorcycles. We pack up our backpacking gear on these bikes and ride dusty logging roads, backwood trails, muddy paths to nowhere, and mountainous routes to remote vistas all over Oregon on 3 or 4 day trips. We've almost died more than a few times but there's really nothing like it. It's a sense of freedom, independence and life like I have never felt before. I've seen sunsets beyond the imagination, ridden with wild horses, ridden through an entire bee hive, been run off the road, crashed a couple times, swam in glacial lakes, and seen the endless beauty this state has to offer and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon! But anyway, that is me!