When
I want to buy a new bra for my mom, I decided to visit the Facebook fan page of
Triumph to choose one whose name is “Triumph international Vietnam”. As many
other businesses, Triumph run their fan page as one of the most effective channel
to reach the customers. Many special events and promotion campaign are created
on this social network only to attract customers to follow their fan page.
However, there is a huge number of followers does not mean that you could make
them keep buying your products.
The
first impression of me is the cover of the page:
Every
day on TV or magazines, I have seen a tons of photos of perfect model girls
with long legs, sexy curves, and especially big busts. Of course such images
are really charming and attractive that make customers want to buy the products.
However, as an Asian girl, I don’t really expect and want to see that photos when
I really need some “real” image to find a suitable products for myself. You
know, bra is a “secret accessorize” of women which needs to fit perfectly to
its owner. If I am finding my own bra, the illustration for such product is
some kind of “biased” because the size of busts of white women and Asian women
is much different. Looking at it, I don’t even realize that whether the product
has the push-up part or not, or how its thickness is. I do believe that many Vietnamese
will have some disappointment when they try a bra because what the products
bring are not the same with what they really expected. But the point here is
that you might feel it is acceptable to find such kind of image in an
international web pages used for all customers over the world, but that should
not be the case of the page of “Triumph international Vietnam”. The first
problem here is that the target customers will not find much common thing
between the model and themselves, which discourage them to buy the product.
Secondly, the customers might find this kind of marketing like “cheating” them
when they realize the differences between what is advertised and what is
selling. The biggest problem in this case is that if the company still use the
same images of white model for all markets they sell the products, they are
wasting partly their effort in creating and managing different pages with the
same content.
The
second issue is that it is really hard for me to choose a suitable bra for my
mom, not because they don’t have any, but because all the models are young. I
don’t know what is exactly the type of bra that both young and older women
could use when I look at those images. In this case I could see that the
hegemonic standard of beauty is being reinforced greatly thanks to the
development of the internet. Beauty is when you are white, you are young, you
are thin and you have big busts! As a company providing products that makes the
most sexy part of women become more attractive, Triumph should bear in mind
that women in different ages with different shapes have their true value of
beauty. By using such images, the company are eliminating a large number of
customers with different ages and shapes.
People
might think that Triumph aims to target young customers only when they use that
image on Facebook fan page because young girls have more access and skills to
the internet and especially social network. However, that is not true that
people without access to the page should not be concerned because in fact
people in marginalized group (in this case, that’s older women) still have
capacity if they have the access. Do you want to lose a part of your customers
when you still have suitable products for them but you have marginalized them
from your advertisements? What if I never visit the page again to find bra for
my mom just because I find no images of the product I am finding even when you still
have it?
Facebook
is a social network that allows you to have detailed demographic information of
a part of your customers which helps you to do the specific segmentation. In
some case it helps you know what exactly your customers love and what they are
finding. The solution for Triumph, of course, is that if they want to take
advantage of social network to create a network for specialized group, they
should also think about taking advantage of such valuable sources of
information. Triumph should turn their concerned of customer demand as said on
the cover picture into not only products but also how they manage their advertisement
on the page in particular and the whole page in general. By doing that they also
could maximize their benefits when creating a specific fan page for each group
of customers. Moreover, Triumph should find the purpose of using Facebook of
customers in each market to know what they really want on such social network.
If Facebook is used much for relationships only, the company might want to
shift their effort to do marketing on other pages to save time and money. If
Facebook is a site that people also want to buy things, they should know how to
update their pages in a good frequency to attract the customers effectively.
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