Week 8: Pricing/ Channels and IMC

This week I read chapter 8 in the Handbook, watched the lectures and listened to the bean cast.  The bean cast had some interesting points about pinterest.com.  This site is making huge waves as a marketing tool.  It has driven a lot of traffic to my wife's website and I think we have a lot of room for growth through it.  

1. Reflect on a firm or product you like which you believe is highly effective in bringing all the elements of the Mix together to create beautiful symphony for their consumers.
1. TurboTax.  Taxes are a huge hassle that most people have to go through each year.  It is by far a sexy product that is the envy of product development people and marketers, but Intuit has done a great job with the marketing mix on this.  The product is very easy and error proof from my experience and held true to their promotion of getting your biggest tax refund, when I tested it out against taxact (took back $2k from the gov't). The place is very convenient, of course by having it online and via an iPad app.  They follow a freemium model giving some basic features away for free, while charging for more in depth features.  Of course you don't pay until the very end in a try-before-you-buy sort of way. Another aspect about place, is that I see ads for turbo tax with bank of America and Mint.com which are key areas that its target market frequent.
2. Who are the target audience for the company's market offerings? 
1. Individuals or small businesses that need to file taxes and are slightly computer savvy. They want to save money/time over going to a place like H&R Block. 
3. What are the tangible products the company offers?
1. A very slick web interface with links to help and support about each topic.  They also have partnered with payroll companies to import W-2 information. A very thorough yet simple process that they walk you through. 
4. How does the company utilize price, and place to enhance the value of its offerings and why do you think there choice work well together?
1. They let you have the basic product for free on their website which can be done at home or anywhere you are. It works great together because there is very little risk (time being the main one) to doing taxes this way.  The also offer several discounts based on links.  The best I found was from BoA for 35% off. 
5. Does the company have a unique approach to communications with their target audience?  How is the approach well suited to the other elements of their mix?
1. They do some very common things such as web advertising, email reminders to past customers (CRM is pretty good) etc.  Not sure if they are doing anything unique, but they are doing things very well.  They use mint.com (another intuit company) to advertise in a very integrated way, but they should be doing this...nothing novel.