The Office Turntable Puts a New Spin on Music Promotion

It’s the age old question for rock bands everywhere: how do you get jaded, hardened music critics and advertisers to listen to your jams when many (in fact, most) CDs and MP3s submitted will immediately be allocated to the circular file (a.k.a the trash can)?
In a brilliant play to persuade the taste makers to take a listen, the German electronic music label Kontor Records utilized mobile technology and a whole lot of groove to promote one of their artist’s latest singles.
In 2015 Electronic music artist Boris Dlougosch’s single arrived in offices as a vinyl album, which in itself gets high marks on the cool scale. But it gets better. The album arrived with its own 2-D cardboard player and instructions for downloading an app that allows the listener to play the album with their smartphone. Yes, you read that correctly…the vinyl album is played with a smartphone! A virtual needle allows listeners to skip through the track just like on a real turntable.
Check out the video…

As the Office Turntable shows, mobile apps can be used in highly creative ways. But mobile apps of varying creativity levels and other personal devices are a large part of a company’s digital marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing, book 2 in the SMstudy Guide® states that since an increasing percentage of consumers use the Internet on-the-go, having a mobile version of a website helps a business reach out to consumers across all devices connected to the Internet.
Novelty in marketing is a tried and true way to grab attention and create interest in a company’s product or service. The SMstudy Guide®, Digital Marketing book supports this idea when discussing innovative internet-enabled business models.  It says, “The growing popularity of the Internet, smartphones and digital media provides opportunities for a company to not only use fragmented new-age marketing effectively to promote existing products, but also to come up with innovative business models where product demo, customer acquisition, and order fulfillment can also take place online.”
 In the case of Back to Vinyl: The Office Turntable marketing campaign, old school vinyl and new school technology come together to give a truly novel music experience that also allows for careful tracking on engagement. According to Kontor, of the 900 mailers sent out, they’ve had a 71 percent activation rate, which they claim is a 64 percent increase above their average. Sounds like they’re on a roll.
(Spring Eselgroth, SMstudy staff writer, contributed to this article.) 

This article has been borrowed from http://www.smstudy.com/Article/the-office-turntable-puts-a-new-spin-on-music-promotion

Marketing Strategy Fundamentals

 With the ever increasing B2B sales and rapidly expanding global network, organizations today face a tough challenge  dominating the competition and gaining substantial market share. Moreover to answer questions like “Where are we now?, Where do we want to be?, and How do we get there?”, companies require a concrete strategy to help comprehend and answer these questions at hand. These multifaceted problems requires the senior management of the companies to work in tandem to create and define “Corporate Strategy”, that helps address the ever increasing challenges of the corporate competition.

Corporate Strategy defined by the company’s senior management team are guiding principles for the organization as a whole which takes into consideration an assessment of the existing capabilities of the company and external opportunities and threats to the business. Thus formulation of a company’s Corporate Strategy requires inputs from multiple stakeholders, particularly senior management who are well aware of the strengths and weakness of the organization.

To device a proper Corporate Strategy most companies use existing documentation regarding their Corporate Product Strategy, Corporate Marketing Strategy, Corporate Operations Strategy, Corporate Finance Strategy, and Corporate Human Resource Strategy. These documents are integrated to help define a coherent Corporate Strategy. The level and complexity of documentation for these strategies vary depending on the size of the company and the breadth of its product portfolio and geographic reach.

Many companies execute strategic planning exercises at appropriate and specific time intervals like once or twice a year to arrive at a corporate strategy. This process helps ensure that leadership team has coherently defined goals and strategies that align with the overall strategic goals of the organization.

Corporate Strategy is often defined at a company level; but strategy can also be formulated at lower levels depending on the size and complexity of the organization. For example, the Corporate Strategy for an entire company can be divided into strategies for each business unit or geographic region and then divided further into specific product or brand strategies for each product or brand in a defined geographic region. The Product or Brand Strategy is the lowest level of this hierarchy.

Corporate Strategy thus acts as a benchmark for the company to execute future plans by carefully assessing it internal and external capabilities and helps inundate actions that aid in achieving overall targets and goals.

Article Overview:- This article is borrowed from www.smstudy.com (Original blog URL http://www.smstudy.com/Article/The-Ladder-for-Strategic-Ascendancy )