Affiliate Marketing

According to Gallaugher et al., affiliate marketing is classified as a type of online advertising, where merchants share percentage of sales revenue generated by each customer, who arrived to the company’s website via a content provider. Content provider also referred to as affiliate, usually places an online ad (for example a banner or a text link) at its website. When visitors click at the ad, they are redirected to merchant’s website and affiliation is tracked by cookie stored on visitor’s computer. Merchants, within online marketing called advertisers, pay for the content providers’ services only when a visitor coming from their website executes a specific action. Such action can be a purchase of a product, filling in a form with personal data, subscription to a newsletter etc.

The affiliates take the whole risk connected with the marketing merchant’s products. The concept is simple. If affiliate’s marketing efforts work, affiliate makes money. If they don’t, affiliate does not make money and pays opportunity costs. There are no limitations for an affiliate how much money it can spend or earn (Duffy, 2005).

For the merchants, employing affiliate marketing is advantageous for merchants from many perspectives. By employing it, merchants can let thousands of independent websites to display ads for its products and only pay them when the ad would actually lead to sale. Advertising costs move from fixed to variable costs, which can facilitate allocating money to advertising (Hoffman & Novak, 2000).

Situational Marketing

Well this is a new one. Followers of this form of marketing, though few at present, say that this concept can revolutionize the marketing field. Lets try and understand it.

Situations can be formed by observing many aspects of everyday behaviour. They can be formed by product and service use, shopping and purchase dynamics, consumer lifestyles and routines, media and promotion consumption. Situation analysis is all about extracting common patterns of behaviour grounded in everyday life. It is about defining the markets based on the experiences people have each and everyday.

How is it an improvement over current marketing practices which most of the companies are following. According to the followers of situational marketing, context and situation drives 40-60% of choices consumers make in their everyday lives and existing methods miss these opportunities. Situational marketing satisfies these opportunities by addressing them and leads to results which benefit both consumers and firms.

I am not in a position to comment on this strategy, about its future which only time will tell. However this concept might be effective for certain products.....and some companies have started using this concept...an example for the same is 

“To begin with, we’re broadening the frame of reference for each of our categories by looking at our products through consumers’ eyes rather than through the narrow lens of our manufacturing processes. With a broader frame of reference, we can compete in larger, faster growing categories; gain share from a wider range of quick meal and snack alternatives; drive incremental volume and mix; and better meet consumer needs.”

- Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft Foods Annual Report 2006

Advertising v/s Promotion

Advertising and promotion are two marketing tools and they are both used in the modern marketing. At first sight it is  very hard to see the exact difference between advertising and promotion. Both advertising and promotion use the same techniques and the gained results are basically the same. However, there are a few things that highlight the difference between advertising and promotion.

Advertising is used for creating strong brands and making long term sales. Beside the long term sales advertising also helps to improve short term and middle term sales too. Building and the strengthening of the consumer loyalty is the ultimate goal of advertising. After starting an advertising campaign the firm must wait a longer period of time before any substantial results can be seen. This time period can be from months to even years. Because of this time frame and the high initial costs, advertising is suitable for large companies and corporations only.

On contrary to advertising, promotion is more focused towards the short term results. Although promotion is also participating in the process of brand building this is not its goal. The only major goal of the promotion is to build the sales in the short time period. The most popular ways of promotion are the discount coupons in the local press, two for one special promotions, free product samples and other special events held in stores. The cost of the promotion is significantly lower than advertising.

(source: http://www.differencebetween.net/business/difference-between-advertising-and-promotion/)

Flanker Brand

A flanker brand is a new brand introduced into the market by a company that already has an established brand in the same product category. The new brand is designed to compete in the category without damaging the existing item’s market share by targeting a different group of consumers. This strategy, also called fighter branding or multibranding, is used to achieve a larger total market share than one product could garner alone. Some examples of flanker brands are:

• Wheel detergent by HUL was a flanker brand to counter the attack by Nirma
• Nihar is a flanker brand for Parachute as it allows Marico to cater to a new consumer segment

(source: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c5-51.html)

Sonic Branding

The sonic brand is the aural equivalent of the traditional graphic representation of corporate and brand identity. From broadcast media to web-based communications, from the retail environment to custom cell phone rings, sonic branding picks up where the advertising jingle leaves off.Sonic branding is increasingly becoming a vehicle for conveying a memorable message to targeted consumers, taking advantage of the powerful memory sense of sound.

• Britannia's trademark jingle tintin dri tin
• The Airtel Music
  
• The INTEL sting
  
• Perhaps an Indian brand that is best remembered for its music is Titan watches. The 25th symphony of Mozart, which was used as Titan watches’ signature tune during its launch in 1986, has become an integral part of the brand.

"Beside" The Line

In today's competing world, where space is crowded and consumers are being hounded by both above the line and below the line media, this strategy is being used more and more by corporations across the globe. 'Beside' the line marketing enters the consumers mind through uncluttered space and leaves a far greater and lasting impression. Psychologists have shown the value of being seen as doing Good for Society has a positive rub off on the observers mind about that corporation.
A strong example of 'Beside' the line spend is the entire gamut of initiatives that Corporates take up and call CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility. This intervention is clearly neither above nor below the line and a fit student of 'Beside' the line activity. Funds are usually controlled outside the regular Marketing budgets and in case of large corporations, can add up to Millions of Dollars each year.
(source: http://www.ameinfo.com/114014.html)

Through The Line (TTL)

Through the line refers to an advertising strategy involving both above and below the line communications in which one form of advertising points the target to another form of advertising thereby crossing the "line". An example would be a TV commercial that says 'come into the store to sample XYZ product'. In this example, the TV commercial is a form of "above the line" advertising and once in the store, the target customer is presented with "below the line" promotional material such as store banners, competition entry forms, etc.
(source: WiKiPedia)