In the article A Social Media Guide for Startups and Entrepreneurs from INC., it talked about how the of social media in marketing. “Social media has made it possible for small startup businesses to reach millions of consumers with the click of a button.” This reminds me a marketing case in China.

As a beauty lover, I followed lots of beauty blogger on Weibo which is a similar social media like Twitter in China. I noticed there was a period of time, some bloggers I followed started to post a review on the same brand foundation, but this brand do not have a real store in mainland China. After about one week, I found almost all the bloggers I followed had wrote reviews about this brand’s products.

Then I started to realized that this is a marketing strategy of this brand. Because all of these bloggers has thousands of followers and what they used or what they’ve recommended might be really influential to some customers since we had already get used to doing research of the product form their blog posts. Just like Sheena Iyengar said in her Ted Talk speech “Individuals preferences was shaped by the preferences of other.”

Still when you started to be interesting in beauty products, you might have 10 different foundations which all claimed that they could provide you the best makeup you ever have experienced. And you might also have 30 different shades of lipstick with different quality, however for people who do not care about makeup that much, these are basically just red, pink or orange. However, why we buy all these similar products?

The article from Entrepreneur “The basics of branding” said that your brand is your promise to your customer. This will tell your differences between other brands and what types of products or which kind of effect it could provide to your customers. This also explained why some woman will buy all those similar lipsticks, because they believe in the ads or the name of the product. And those lipsticks usually have really beautiful, attractive even sexy names, and the way they branding itself is also extremely critical.  Thus even though we know we already have a lipstick with similar color in home, we might still click the button of “purchase”. We buy it for names, we buy it for fantasies, fantasies the brand provide for us.

The choices which brand could provide to customers is also crucial in marketing. After last week, we’ve visit RISE office, I realized how interesting of the whole process of define your product are. Since this project is MSU based, they also focus their customers on MSU students and facilities. They provide all different choices from different flavors of teas which was organic gowned in MSU. Just like Sheena Iyenga said “every little differences matters, every choices matters” because these slightly different between material or herbals been used made this brand unique and helps it stand out from all other similar brands in the competitive market.