How Does One Use End-Users as a Marketing Tool?

Prometheus Solar was the product of the 300-level class "Developing a Marketing Plan" in which the class was split into groups and told to come up with a product and a marketing plan for it. I had lead the group of 5 students in developing a plan to bring solar panels to low-income communities in Texas. This peculiar product and demographic choice came from the rationale that the underprivileged communities of cities like Austin, TX are among those in most desperate need of reliable and cheaper energy and our research having revealed that we can use local community center buildings' roofs as make-shift solar farms as well as employing government subsidies to fund the entire business, thus providing a community with much needed energy, cutting energy costs for local businesses, and costing neither party a single cent.

Regarding the marketing, the first unorthodox decision made was to advertise not to the the members of impoverished communities that we aimed to help, but rather the owners of the buildings on whose rooves we intended to build the solar arrays as our plan hinged entirely on their cooperation. The marketing strategy consisted of 4 distinct steps.

1. Vox Populi

   The first step of the plan was to start a 3-month long information campaign to inform the populace of our targeted demographic about the possibilities of solar and of our offer, as they are unlikely to have considered such options due to the perception of solar power as a luxury good. This would be done through the use of radio ads playing during rush hours, billboards and conventional social media ads on Facebook and Instagram. The messaging of these ads would focus on the security, stability and reduced electricity costs that our product could provide the impoverished communities. The ultimate purpose of this step is to encourage community members to begin talking and posting about our offer, thus leading to the owners of the buildings on whose roofs we want to put our panels to initially hear about the idea and gain the impression that it is something that people living in their area are interested in, setting them up to be the heroes that help their local community.

2. LinkedIn

   Step 1 is paired simply with LinkedIn ads targeted towards community-center building owners advertising the energy-cost saving benefits of solar energy, the government program we would be employing to save them installation costs, framing the matter as making them feel like savvy investors and businesspeople for thinking of their companies future.

3. Sales Representatives

   Whilst this plan does involve leveraging local community voices and LinkedIn ads, we were not naïve enough to believe that was sufficient to convince business owners to install large solar arrays on their roofs. Thus, coinciding with the previous steps, we would organize a small team of salespeople to tour local business, pitching them the material benefits of solar arrays as well as the appeal of being both clever business owners and morally good humans that help their local communities (and all the extra patronage that increased goodwill can bring).

4. Tit for Tat

   Lastly, even though we are employing a government program to greatly reduce client costs, we would offer a referral discount to any business-owner that could refer us to another business that would lead to a successful sale. This would allow us to use not only our own resources to promote our services, but also those of the people in the local community and the community of local business-owners.

All of this comes together to create a plan that approaches our true target audience from practically every direction short of paying off their families to whisper the words "Prometheus Solar" into their ear as they sleep.

Different Nation, Different Market

Dermacol is a Czech cosmetics company founded in the 1960's which rose to fame for its flagship product, an incredibly potent concealer which also had medical properties, made using high-quality materials, and has a long history of being held in high regard by those that know of the brand.

I got the opportunity to work with the company as part of a short summer internship in 2024, during which my cohort and I were split into groups and asked to come up with an influencer-marketing strategy that might help the company, dominant in their home country, expand into the US cosmetics market.

As our competing groups decided to focus on smaller US subcultures such as concert-goers or drag queens, my group decided to go with a decidedly less flashy, but significantly more stable and reliable, if unorthodox path.

Research

Target Demographic

• Primary consumers of cosmetics in the USA are teenage girls

• 51+% of them suffer from acne or other skin conditions.

• 59% expressed an interest in medicated cosmetics products.

• 55% of teenagers said they used family as sources of information as to which cosmetics to use.

• 59% of teenagers surveyed claimed to receive either some or all of their cosmetics from their family members.

From this data we can infer the following: Our end-users are teenage girls with large concerns about their skin health, who get their products through their parents. Excellent, our main product is an all-purpose concealer with medical properties.

Target Demographic Interests

• 69% of people aged 25-44 claimed to get their cosmetics and beauty information from YouTube.

• Among all age demographics, a product being "doctor-recommended" was the greatest piece of additional information towards making a cosmetics product appealing.

• Concerns for healthy materials greatest among mothers.

As a result, we can infer that the aged 25-44 demographics of mothers is generally most interested in cosmetics that are promoted on YouTube by medical professionals. Leading us to search and find several YouTubers who are also dermatologists we can collaborate on the project with.

The Plan

I must thank my mother for the big idea behind this plan. I have not had any experience with makeup in my life and am personally incredibly poorly-suited to understand the realities of using the product. Understanding my limitations regarding the matter, I consulted a woman I knew would have both experience and some strong opinions on the subject. She pointed me towards the direction of targeting mothers with the idea that she, as the mother of an at-the-time 11 year old girl, my sister, was the sole person buying her first makeup products and was generally very concerned for the quality of the products her daughter would be using.

To summarize previous findings, we have a product that is already a medical-grade concealer that is also excellent at concealing acne and other skin conditions, aimed at teenage girls through their incredibly health-conscious mothers who get most of their beauty and cosmetics info through YouTube, focusing on dermatology-related content. Add to that the fact that securing customers when they are young leads to much greater retention rates than older customers and the fact that the US cosmetics market is incredibly oversaturated, compared to the relatively underserved medicated-cosmetics market that a small Czech company has no real chance competing in, and you have a plan to rebrand their main product, the concealer, as a health product and target the aforementioned demographic through YouTube dermatology content.

Lastly, we thought to attach an attempt at a trend to the promotion. #DermacolBond would be a hashtag that would focus on having mothers and daughters, the main target demographics of the campaign, tell the story of a make-up related memory the two of them share in order to promote the mother-and-daughter bond that the shared interest and experience with makeup can create, thus associating our brand not just with physical health, but familial connection and love.