Rival brands: friendly competition or battle that neither can ever win?

I have to agree with the age old phrase "competition drives innovation". The worlds best-marketed brands all seem to have one strong rival with each brand constantly trying to out-market the other. It  is these brands which I find fascinating and it is even more interesting to consider whether brands in fact, benefit from these huge rivalries.

Directly targeting or responding to the competition is highly common in marketing efforts, I have seen it in my own industry, telecoms, with ads such as these:

3 hit out at Vodafone customers with this banned ad

Vodafone's ad promising a Fixed Price for your entire contract

However, there are far more famous and controversial rivalries:

1. McDonalds vs Burger King

As I mentioned, innovation is key in beating your rivals and due to the fact that McDonalds and Burger King's value propositions are fairly homogeneous, there is a lot of mimicking from both sides. Big Mac, Whopper... are there really many differences? Both brands have sued each other for copyright infringement on a number of occasions. 

Burger King actually made a peace offering for just one day in this story, which was swiftly rejected by McDonalds!  However, what a great bit of PR for BK anyway, making them look like the soft, underdog!

2. Pepsi vs Coca-Cola

Perhaps one of the most historic rivalries, dating back to the early 1900s, and the creativity behind the rival campaigns is fantastic.

Pepsi are definitely more aggressive in their competitive attitude through advertising, but unfortunately Coke have held on to the top spot. Coke has become a name to replace the cola industry as a whole- who goes in to a bar and says "Can I have a vodka and Pepsi?". Coca-cola tend to stick to their traditional roots in terms of branding whereas Pepsi go modernistic, proving that being true to your roots pays off. Coke markets happiness with their 'Share a coke' campaign or their new slogan 'Taste the feeling', whereas Pepsi go for a 'cool' vibe with collaborations with NFL and David Beckham.

3. Apple vs Samsung

Samsung are definitely the Pepsi of the mobile technology world. Their dig at Apple (and Apple customers) below, indicates their willingness to take on the rivalry first hand:

You are often asked; are you an Apple or a Samsung person and it's rare that people switch between the two. I am an Apple user but of course since working at Vodafone my eyes have been opened to the world of Android and how much Android devices can really do. However, if you compare Samsung and Apple's marketing spend vs market share, the true stats really become clear:
Samsung: £8.4bn of marketing spend 19.9% of smartphone market share 15% of total operating income of smartphone makers Apple: £1bn of marketing spend 14.6% of smartphone market share 92% of total operating income of smartphone makers
Whilst Samsung make phones to suit lots of markets, providing lower-range cheap smartphones as well as your S6 Edge's to a premium market, the numbers really do show that Apple's smaller range, however highly targeted to those who expect more from their phones, really does pay off. 

Hope you enjoyed this post, let me know your favourite brand rivalries, tweet me at @stefclarkx

What is a Product Manager?

I'm currently in Placement Two of my Graduate Programme at Vodafone which is a Product Manager role within the Innovation team. Now, when people ask my role, they often mishear my title and thing I say Project Manager! However, the role of Product Manager is distinctly different. If you're a recent graduate, student, interested in marketing roles or have even just heard of Product Managers within your organisation and wondered what the hell it is- let me fill you in on a Day in the Life of a Product Manager.

Product Managers are not a million miles away from Brand Managers, however this depends on the type of organisation. A firm with an umbrella brand and lots of sub-brands e.g. Unilever, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle etc. will probably have a lot more Brand Managers than an organisation which feeds from the strength one core brand e.g. Apple, McDonalds, Amazon, Samsung and my company, Vodafone, who primarily employ Product Managers. However, effectively the two roles are pretty similar.

On a very high level, Product Managers oversee everything which concerns a certain product. They try and drive usage/ sales/ downloads/ customer satisfaction/ whatever other KPIs marketers pluck out of their objectives and make sure the product is performing. This effectively means you have to make the maximum revenue from your product and ensure your product is doing exactly what it should be doing for the business. This of course, means you must align your product to fit in with the wider business strategy and listen to the needs of the business before you decide exactly how to market your product.

You must also be very close to and focused on the customer. Understand their every need and get feedback on the user experience, which includes a lot of testing, testing and more testing! As a Product Manager, there is also a technical understanding of your product/s needed on a higher level, to know exactly how they work, what is possible and how to develop them.

As all products go through a life cycle, it is important to understand the different times within product managing, right through from launch, growth, maturity, decline and then either rejuvenation or closing/ discontinuing a product. You as Product Manager will oversee all of these stages and
literally be the expert on this product for its entire life!

Launch

Before you can launch a product you need a need that this problem solves for the customer, backed up by a bunch of research! With a deep understanding of the market and your target audience, as well as a real passion for the product, as you are going to have to be the salesperson to every single person inside and outside of the business.

Growth

You then continually plan roadmaps for your product to understand exactly where you want it to go and how you are going to get it there. This might be working super closely with developers, marketing communications activity or user experience improvements. You have to have super attention to detail as you pick out every little nit-picky error or problem with your product and put it right! There are always problems along the way which need solving.

Maturity

This is where you can look at your product and gather enough data about it to understand exactly what customers like and dislike about it. Do you need to make a price change, completely change the product's features or invest heavily in marketing to keep your numbers up?

Decline

Upon the product's decline you can consider two options, closing the product or revitalising it entirely. The businesses' goals may have changed, the market may have changed or the product may simply be too costly to make a profit anymore. This is where you can consider targeting a new audience, changing the structure of the product or redesigning it.

My Role

My role within Product Management is of course within a mobile technology brand and I manage a number of apps. Day-to-day I may be speaking to app developers to improve our user experience on the apps, speaking to various functions within the business such as Brand to get one of our images in the app approved, Digital to get a webpage which mentions my app changed, CVM to promote our app through an email or SMS campaign, Customer Services to make sure the agents know exactly what to say if a customer asks a question about my product or even liaising with Market Research teams to understand how much customers are enjoying my apps!

The role is super varied and means you can really put your passions and energy in to one or two products and they are your entire responsibility- which can be a good OR bad thing, depending on how well your product is doing!

If you have any questions or are interested in a Product Management role, please tweet me at @stefclark

I'll do my next role profile within Placement 2!

Stephanie

What it's REALLY like in a Vodafone Graduate Assessment Centre

Apologies for the lack of blog posts recently, I have been none stop with uni work and graduate job searching!

As the second part in my graduate marketing job hunt- I was recently invited to attend the Vodafone Marketing Stream Graduate Assessment Centre and here's what happened!

I'd been meaning to do the Vodafone application form for ages but I had kept putting it off as I was super busy, however one evening I sat down and wrote my cover letter and answers to a few simple questions and sent them off with my CV. I really liked the Vodafone application form in comparison to most of the graduate applications I was used to, which were endless questions and hundreds of boxes to fill in. I like to think my CV speaks for itself and by compacting the selling of myself into a short cover letter, I was able to get across the most important points concisely and highlight my best assets!

I was then invited to complete the dreaded verbal and numerical reasoning tests- an absolute pain! I really tried hard to complete them to the best of my ability although I was convinced I'd failed the numerical one... I'm bloody awful at Maths so I ended up guessing a fair few of the answers!

However, the next day I was told I had passed the tests (I was so shocked!) and was invited to complete a video interview. I actually found this part of the recruitment process really fun and had to sit infront on my iPad and wait for the questions to pop up then I had 30 seconds to prepare my answer before I recorded it and then they sped off to Vodafone! The questions were really varied and ranged from what 3 things would I take to a desert island to more specific to Vodafone. However, I believe this part of the process wasn't specific to a particular department so they were still fairly general.

Then the next day, I got another email saying I'd made it through to the next stage and could I come in for an assessment centre a week later!! It all happened within the space of a few days which was really awesome as it was all fresh in my mind and I could really focus all of my attention on the application.

So I headed to Newbury, Vodafone's HQ which is absolutely awesome- really modern and so Vodafied (new word!). There were lots of other candidates- I'd say around 30, however we were told that there were lots of ACs happening over a few weeks and they were recruiting for 150 roles- so the element of competition was eliminated from the atmosphere- something I really hate when going for a job interview, I'd much rather people sell themselves as who they are... rather than who they are compared to a competitor.

All of the employees running the day were absolutely lovely, and lots of current grads came throughout the day to answer any questions we had. I felt really relaxed and not at all nervous- I'm not sure if this was due to the speed at which I'd breezed through the previous application stages or the fact that the other candidates were really lovely, but I was really keen to get through the day!

My first activity was a presentation based on a case study, which we had 45 minutes to read through and provide recommendations and analysis based on downfalls of a business. I found this really easy as I study services marketing and the task was really similar to what we do within the module- I also really liked my interviewer and delivered the presentation to him whilst making jokes and got along with him. It didn't feel like a normal, formal interview and that's what I really liked about the day.

We were then given a coffee break before I was invited to have a one-to-one interview with one of the Sales Directors. He asked me a number of competency questions which I found really simple and he liked my blog, enactus, placement year and my self-employed event work- I felt really prepared and had lots of examples to give!

Then, he started asking me more marketing-specific questions, some about social media which I found OK and then one which threw me off slightly.... he asked "what are the three most important things when creating a marketing campaign?" I was totally thrown off and I almost argued back to him saying how subjective the question was, I hadn't been given any context whatsoever and on that basis, how could I answer when I had no idea what the objectives were, who the target audience was or what media was being used?

I know he was just reading the questions off a piece of paper, but I felt as though the question wasn't testing my marketing knowledge (which arguably is fairly in-depth) so I got a little frustrated. I could tell he was trying to guide me a little which helped... however I knew I hadn't done so well on that particular question.

We were then given a tour of the offices, set in gorgeous green space with loads of client space, a gym and Starbucks AND Costa... slightly better than what was on offer at IBM I must say.... the current graduates answered loads of questions and were super friendly.

It was then my turn to complete the group exercise, and one of the grads had told me during the tour it was about developing an app (not sure if he should have told me that- but thanks ;-)) so I had been thinking about it and therefore when we all sat down and were given the task- I already had an idea in my head. My group were all really confident and respectful, and my app idea was chosen by the entire group which made me feel really happy! The assessors asked us questions at the end which I think I nailed to be honest!

I left the day feeling really positive and weighing up the idea of living in Newbury... I've wanted to move to London for so long that I wasn't sure... however Vodafone looked like really awesome employers.

Vodafone had told us they'd let us know the outcome of the day before the weekend (the AC was on the Wednesday) so I was pretty much glued to my phone all day on the Friday, despite being in London on and off the tube... and the second they rang I happened to be in the bloody lift going down to Covent Garden station so I couldn't answer! Then my phone ran out of battery! It was such a palava!!

However, when I did manage to phone back, I was told I'd passed the Assessment Centre... however I was told I'd been put on to the Sales stream rather than the Marketing stream as they felt that was a better fit!! Not going to lie, I was gutted, I'd really wanted to get on to the Marketing stream and wasn't happy at all going in to sales, however the salary was reasonable and at least it was A job... so I asked for the weekend to think about it.

However, over the weekend I'd thought more and more about it and realized that I hadn't put 4 years of my life into pursuing a career in marketing to then take a sales job, I decided my passions came first so when she rang me back on the Monday I politely declined the offer.

I was just expecting a complete rejection, however- I was then passed on to the head of recruitment who I somehow managed to convince to put me on the marketing stream! I explained that I was really passionate about a career in marketing and that I had worked so hard for it and I knew that the reason I had been moved to sales was because of that one bloody question! So she asked me what I would have said instead and then said she would move me as she could sense my passion!
I felt so good about myself then and I knew it's exactly where I want to be- so I'm very chuffed to say I will be joining the marketing department at Vodafone this September as a graduate!