Luxury Retreats

The email subject line did the first part of the work for us: Who says resolutions can’t be fun?

After clicking the email, subscribers hit a landing page where they could stamp their virtual passport with all the destinations they wanted to visit in the next year.

After dragging and dropping destinations, subscribers were able to save their passports, share it with friends, and get a freebie that they were not expecting—free car rental for their next vacation.

The coolest part for the marketer starts here: now you have a database with all the destinations that your subscribers are thinking about going over the next year. And with that info we retargeted subscribers in January, with a very simple text email, coming from their Travel Luxury Advisor, to dig for more details on their vacation plans.

Campaign Success

The results were great! They were able to convert 40% of the answers into leads that were worked directly by their sales team.

With a little bit of creativity they were able to turn a game into a “lead generator” to start the year with great numbers without bugging their subscribers.

They are already working on their ideas for the 2014 holiday season that will give them the precious data that all marketers crave and the fun and engagement that their subscribers are expecting at this time of year.

Sensation's Marketing Strategies

The Sensation Music Venue

 

Sensation is one of the biggest global music venues all over the world.

It takes place in Amsterdam, Prague, New York, Dubai, Johannesburg, Bologna, Moscow and many more cities around the globe.

It’s considered one of the more exclusive EDM music events  every year.

The main marketing strategy is to project very positive image of being part of something special and exclusive and unique.

The dress code for the event is total white, as a part of the same very experience of pure sound and soul awareness.

Long before the event, they begin to apply different selling strategies and offer different ways of selling you not only a ticket - but the entire experience.

Initially at very restricted group of members they sell travel packets, which may include exclusive transfer from the airport, some special gifts at the hotel arrival, VIP transportation to the event, VIP entrance and very exclusive and strategic position inside the venue.

After this initial period, they begin to sell tickets with differentiate targets and price tag.

• General Entrance
• Deluxe
• Deluxe with dinner

During this stage, organizers create hype about the event trough emails, social media and websites. The marketing objective at this stage of the marketing strategy is to sell-out within hours from the announcement, once the selling on to the large public begins.

The best part of this venue is that it is really, really unique music experience. Usually there are more than 30k people all together, and the quality and the attention to every detail of the venue - the stage, the organisation and the line-up with the best World DJs is simply astonishing. The quality pays very well. For those that love the EDM is one of the best experiences.

Sensation`s organizers also sell a lot of merchandise, promoting new music and alternative genres. They main strategy is to offer a high quality experience at a higher price, because of the quality linked to the emotions.

It happened that in countries than are been heated by the economic crisis and won’t sell out, they cancelled the event, in order to keep the brand high positioned.

I've been at the event different times and, in my opinion, one of the best themes was `The source of lights`. It was really astonishing experience.

Team building Activities is something that all of the members do together for same goal not official and formal like corporate task but just casual and enjoyable. Nowadays, it has been very notable because it is practically functioning to let employees know what is team work, how interdependent they are and an effect of good synergy. This activities are based on making each team member concentrating something by their being willing to do fun activities, so it can improve their dedication ,contribution and loyalty when they go back to their own duties. There are lots of activities in Auckland, such as  painting together and raft race. Especially, raft race is intersting, because it has two steps of competitions which are consist of first and second competiton. Second competiton is main and first one is only for getting items which will be used in next real one. Aucklanders are benefited by thoseactivities to improve their fellowship and efficiency of team work.

Instagram and Whatssapp taken over by Facebook.

Four years ago, on March of 2010, Instagram was launched to the market with the idea of enhance photos and share them in the web. Its creator, Kevin Systrom,and his ex-classmate Mike Krieger started the company based on the app with a seed funding from Baseline Ventures ( a firm that focuses on seed investments in technology companies)

As the time went by, the application was transforming and implementing new issues like the hashtag, new filters and higher resolution, becoming Instagram more used and popular.

In April 2012, Facebook announced an offer to acquire the smartphone app for US$1 billion in cash and stock. At the time the app company just had 13 employees and was comparatively small, however there’s no application as popular and beloved, with more than 30 million users uploading more than 5 million new pictures per day.

For Facebook was an important investment, its founder expressed: "This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all."

The public was concerned about the service that they already knew would be absorbed by FB, and the investors were concerned about whether it would contribute to the financial balance of the company.

The Instagram CEO and founder promised the independence of the application saying:

"It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.

The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks. And you’ll still have all the other features that make the app so fun and unique."

As he promised, the app have been presenting new features, introducing, photo maps and a tool called Lux for balancing exposure and adjusting brightness, new filters and higher quality camera, keeping its independence from Facebook, but creating ways to join both social networks.

Nowadays Instagram has more than 200 million users (more than what Zuckerberg expected) and more than 20 billion pictures are uploaded every day. As well as that, Facebook completes its $22 billion acquisition of WhatsApp recently in cash and stock and hitting with the biggest acquisition in its history.

The founder promise to keep each application separately as he did it with Instagram, and expect to bring more connectivity and utility in the communication services.

It’s not known how will be this new acquisition, but it’s proven that Whatssapp has grown quicker than the Facebook itself in the last five years having more than 450 million monthly users around the world. 

Citycorp is a US bank which operated around the world in more than 70 countries merged with Travelers one of the most important insurances company’s around the world. That deal was made by a stock swap operation where Travelers purchased all the Citycorp stock for 70 billion of dollars and replaced each stock of Citycorp with 2,5 stocks of the new company (City) which means that the shareholders of the both companies will own about the half of the new company.

After the merge City became  the biggest financial company in the world. the  merger  just was possible because some US laws about mergers between financial conglomerates and banks become more flexible because the pressure from those giants to the US congress, besides the merger was not totally successful because the insurance department of City keep working by itself because the lack of synergy between Citycorp and Travelers  

Team building

Companies become more and more complexity, what means they become more and more interconnected and as a result, the working structures become strongly cross-departmental. Shorter development times as well as an optimized product quality management, customer-oriented service concepts and flat hierarchy are essential requirements in order to cope with market conditions, which are constantly changing.



Based on these factors, it is very important for companies to have excellent skilled employee in order to manage all these different difficult situations and issues, because all employees decide about success and failure of their company, not only one team member. When people, with very different personalities and backgrounds, are working for the same organization or department, the company can run into problems when these personalities clash.



Because of that, it is very important that each team member knows their own skills and abilities in order to use synergies as well as similarities to enable a successful collaboration in their team. The individual behavior and the awareness of each employee are critical factors to get on with colleagues and have a successful collaboration. Finally, clear goals and distinct distribution of roles enable an efficient collaboration and are the basis for a good team work. It is useful to use the complementarity of the different characters of each employee in order to improve the team success.



For employees, it is easy to recognize this theoretically, but the practical implementation is often difficult. Only the practical experience helps employees to understand the process of team building exactly and give rise to a better team orientating as well as a better self-image. The participants have fun to learn and discover new silks and they are involved actively in a process, which includes a lot of facets of the human awareness, which means thinking, action and emotional and physical experience.



In order to become a successful team building process, a specific team composition and clear goals are important. It is recommended to analyze the company well as well as the structure of each department, the basic conditions of the team and the aims. A demand-orientated training is also important as well as information, if participants have any fears or suggestions. During the training process the outcomes have to be fixed and after some months, a follow-up is necessary.

A team building process is in different phases in a process meaningful and can support theses phases successfully. Especially, teambuilding is very important during the structure of new project groups, cross-departmental cooperation, implementing of new employees and structural changes.  These points are important for all organizational-ladder.



The team motivating for new goals increases, the existing communication structures will be improved and the solving of conflicts will be revised. As a result, teams could reach a higher identification with the company culture and a better we-feeling. Likewise, all these points promote homing processes, motivation, team strategy, the creating of behavioral codes as well as the balance of the self-image and the image of others.



For instance, leaders are supported to build and create new working and project teams and an employee can train abilities like communication skills and empathy and as a result, the overcoming of conflict and stress situations.



Some companies offer such training in NZ and in Auckland, for example:

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/corporate-team-building-retreat-ideas-2000.html

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_52.htm

Additionally, if such trainings are offered in the nature, for example in a forest, the motivation will increase and the creativity will foster because of the unfamiliar and foreign environment.

Team building