Glidden Point Oyster Company, A.G.A. Correa & Son, Hardy Boat Cruises, Maine Gold
Promotion from a Distance

At first glance, the four companies featured in the video for this chapter seem to have little in common outside of the fact that they're all located in Maine. What can a small business that harvests oysters possibly have in common with one that offers birding cruises? What connects a business that designs nautical jewelry to one that produces maple syrup? Once you watch the video and become a little more familiar with the products each company offers, you'll realize the connection-each offers a top-quality, unique product that draws customers from a distance. Barbara Scully takes a great deal of pride in offering the best oysters to be had anywhere. She and her husband started harvesting their oysters, by hand, in 1987.

Every part of the process is demanding- even the constant water-quality monitoring they must do to assure their oysters are grown in pristine waters. The care the Glidden Point Oyster team puts into its product results in an oyster of exceptional quality, which means Scully can target a customer who can afford to buy the best. Glidden Point Oyster Company does direct mailing and has an Internet site, but Scully credits her marketing success to customer service (not easy to come by in the seafood industry) and her reputation for offering the highest-quality oyster available.

When Tony Correa was a young man, he started designing jewelry with a nautical theme, based on his love for sailing and marine hardware. Today, Correa and his son, Andy, sell the jewelry in a highly successful direct-mail catalog business. Andy Correa says the catalog they send out is beautiful, with copy that makes the customer feel confident about ordering a piece of jewelry he or she can only see in a picture. But Tony argues that their marketing success is as likely the result of their purchase of very specific mailing lists from a list broker. The jewelers mail their catalog only to a targeted group of people- customers who have a recent history of purchasing through mail order. Hardy Boat Cruises also engages in distance marketing.

Al and Stacie Crocetti started their nature cruise and ferry business with just an idea and a boat. Today, they are winners of a Gulf of Maine Visionary Award, for sustaining both their business and their community while preserving the health of the marine environment. Part of the company's promotion strategy involves mailing out brochures to names on mailing lists from birding groups. The Crocettis also rely a great deal on word-of-mouth advertising, hoping that a cruise on the Hardy Boat will be such a great experience that tourists will tell other tourists and townspeople, who in turn will recommend the cruises to even more people.

Stacie is most excited, however, by the ever-expanding reach of the Web, saying that it is the number one advertising tool they couldn't do without. Type a keyword such as "Maine puffins" or "Monhegan Island" into a search on the Web and the Hardy Boat website will be in the search engine's list. Further inland are Perry Gates and Deborah Meehan, owners of Maine Gold, a maple-product gift business. Gates and Meehan had been tapping maple trees for 30 years and knew where all the sweetest trees were located when they came across a maple syrup contest sponsored by Maine's Department of Agriculture. After winning first prize in the contest for five years running, the couple decided to try to build a business out of their talent.

Today, they have about 13,000 people on their mailing list and have never bought a name or a list. Maine Gold just keeps growing, as tourists buy their products from the retail store and then send for the mail-order brochure or buy products through the company's website. Those initial customers then turn their friends and relatives into customers by sending gifts of sweet maple syrup products to them. Gates and Meehan agree that their business success is built on relationships, including the connections between the customer and the Maine Gold staff and the customer and the person who is receiving their gift. Before answering the questions and working the activities, watch the video on Glidden Point Oysters, Correa jewelers, Hardy Boat Cruises, and Maine Gold. Watch for the various types of promotion you learned about in Chapter 16.

Question
1. Which promotional techniques has each of the companies used to build its business? Be specific. Once you have a list of ways in which they promote their business, organize the promotional techniques on your list into the categories discussed in the chapter (personal selling, advertising, and sales promotion).

2. The objectives of advertising are to inform, persuade, and remind consumers about the existence or superiority of a firm's product or service. Which function best describes the goal of each company's advertising? Explain why you think as you do. What type of advertising does each company create-product, institutional, or something else altogether?

Activities

1. Stacie Crocetti of Hardy Boat Cruises considers her website to be one of her best promotional activities. Visit http://www.hardyboat.com and write down the types of promotional strategies being used on the site. Then search using keywords "Maine puffin" or "Maine boat tours" on Google or Yahoo! Visit the websites of some of the competitors, and compare their Internet presence to that of Hardy Boat Cruises.

2. Imagine that you have recently been hired by Correa jewelers as a marketing manager. You are familiar with the company's current website, and you would like to improve it. Before you present your ideas to the company owners, however, you decide to mock up some four-color (i.e., full-color) website plans to show them.

Create a full-page webpage that communicates a message consistent with the company's business philosophy but utilizes a more user-friendly or more appealing format. (See the company's website at http://www.agacorrea.com.) Use call-outs to describe the various sections on the page and explain how the elements you have chosen convey your intended message. Share your ideas with your classmates.