All Posts Tagged With: "marketing"
Dr. Chocolate teaches marketing and the pleasure of food
Jordan LeBel is a 3M National Teaching Fellow for 2013
Professor Jordan LeBel
Jordan LeBel, who began working in kitchens when he was 12 years old, was destined to be a chef. But his parents weren’t so sure. They persuaded him to take a hospitality management course instead, putting him on a career track that would include restaurant reviewer, author, and a renowned chocolate expert who colleagues and students call Dr. Chocolate.
Now LeBel, 44, teaches Concordia’s highly popular, one-of-a-kind food marketing class, where he shares his passion with students. It’s his enthusiasm for his subject—consumer psychology and the pleasure of food—that makes him a favourite among students and one of 10 3M National Teaching Fellows for 2013.
“There is just so much to learn about it from so many different angles,” says LeBel. “I want to open people’s eyes and teach them everything they can learn about food.”
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What students are talking about today (October 18th edition)
Snoop Dog, Mulcair, Halloween, Movember & study space
Snoop Dog
1.Snoop Dog (Snoop Lion?) is now endorsing that gooey microwavable student staple known as Hot Pockets. In a video advertisement that already has three million views, he’s reworked his 2004 hit “Drop It Like It’s Hot” into “Pockets Like It’s Hot.” He may be a sellout, but that bicycle with a microwave attached is a wicked idea.
2. Speaking of ridiculous advertisements, Anne Kingston tears apart Brad Pitt’s new commercial, in which he says: “It’s not a journey. Every journey ends, but we go on. The world turns, and we turn with it. Plans disappear, dreams take over. But wherever I go, there you are, my luck, my fate, my fortune. Chanel No. 5, inevitable.” Uhhh… What?
3. In an interview with the University of Regina’s Carillon, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair said some notable things. His assertion that “the average student finishes university with over $40,000 in debt,” doesn’t match any estimate I’ve seen. (Even the debt warriors at the Canadian Federation of Students peg the average at $27,000.) He also says youth are mostly concerned about the environment. “Most young people are a little bit less concerned about the economics, except for the fact that they realize that consistent failure to invest in post-secondary education is playing tricks on them,” he added, suggesting the federal government “get back to the level of [PSE] funding that we saw before the 1990s, before the Liberals started downloading to the provinces.”
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Concordia professor links taste and identity
“Reading Apartment Therapy is way more than just a passive leisure activity”
A new article in the Journal of Consumer Research explores how the notion of taste is an integral part of our identities. The researchers, including Concordia University marketing professor Zeynep Arsel, devised a framework that sees taste-making as a three part process. From Concordia:
The researchers turned to a surprising source for their findings: Apartment Therapy, a popular website with a fresh take on present-day interior decorating that has had more hits than Martha Stewart’s online empire. Arsel and Bean painstakingly combed through hundreds of thousands of posts and comments on the website to uncover how its readers were forming their own notions of personal taste by following a prescriptive view of what constitutes cool when it comes to interior decorating.
“It turns out that reading Apartment Therapy or watching a do-it-yourself home decorating show is way more than just a passive leisure activity,” explains Arsel. “It’s really an element of practice that influences how people relate to objects and what they do with them.”
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In demand economists
Major technology firms are on the hunt for economists
The job most in demand in Silicon Valley lately is not in social networking or marketing, but something slightly less trendy. Major technology firms are on the hunt for economists. Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon.com and eBay are all currently recruiting economists, reports the San Jose Mercury News. Those companies are following the likes of Google and Microsoft, which in recent years have added big-name academics to their staffs, including Hal Varian from University of California, Berkeley and Susan Athey from Harvard University, respectively.
Economists have proven adept at helping tech firms tweak everything from search methods to online advertising platforms—intricate systems that can be manipulated to produce better results, or studied to predict outcomes from different strategies. Tech firms also tend to be creating entirely new businesses, and sometimes the best person to help explain how traditional markets will react to them is a good old-fashioned economist.
The great advertising heist
York accuses the Globe of stealing their ad strategy
York University’s marketing department has had just about enough of the Globe and Mail stealing their signature advertising concept, according to the Financial Post. The Post reports that the two parties are negotiating over what York is arguing is the theft of their advertising strategy.
The ads in dispute are from the recently launched Globe campaign that shows a graphic (a chicken, gun, and so on) with three text bubbles describing different ways sections in the newspaper would approach the topic.
York is arguing that the ads too closely resemble their longtime ad strategy. York’s ads have a similar graphic with three lines describing how different academic departments would study the topic. (They even have a chicken.)
Academica Group — that, among other things, works with universities on recruitment and marketing initiatives — put together a nice photo montage of the ads. And since the Globe allegedly stole the idea from York, and Academica borrowed the images from both, we reasoned that it was only fair for us to filch Academica’s version. Here it is:
