CPS meets Google Product Search

You may remember hearing about a Google product called Froogle. You can use Google to search for basically anything: articles, companies, listings, news, games, toys, products, etc. Froogle allows you to search a massive inventory of products ... as the page says: "Search for stuff to buy." It is the ultimate online shopping experience. Rather than stopping at Best Buy online to compare cameras, you can compare cameras from Best Buy, Walmart, Idaho Camera, Radio Shack, Circuit City ... ALL stores at the same time.

Froogle was renamed to Google Product Search in 2006. (Read this article for more information on the Froogle history.) It looks a lot like the standard Google Search Engine, simple and minimalistic, but has some key differences.

Container & Packaging Supply is going through the process of listing all 2,200 of our items on Google Product Search. This is the equivalent of having our entire product line available in the largest department store on the planet. Customers can now find our products on Google, as well as on our site.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to the Google Product Search engine: http://www.google.com/products
2. Type "blue glass vial" into the search field. Hit "Search Products."
   
3. Your search engine results page (SERP) returns about 544 items.
4. Choose "Sort by: Price: Low to high" from the drop down menu on the upper right corner of the page.
5. VOILA! Our G109 moves to the top of the list.
6. If you click on the image, it takes you directly to our G109 item page.
   

Here are some extra tips and features:

• By clicking on the "Add to shopping list" link directly under the G109 item, you can generate a list of vials from hundreds of different providers and then ultimately choose your favorite (ours, of course).
• You can create shopping lists and then email them to friends, parents, our spouses. You can disseminate your Santa list to your entire list of friends (not recommended).
• You can refine your search (scroll to the bottom of the SERP) by price range, brand name or store. Click the "more" link under "Store" and choose "Container & Packaging Supply." You'll see all the items that CPS has to offer (we're still working on populating this list).

Oh, and it's all free. We just got all of our items on the shelves at the Google Product Search grocery store without spending a dime!

Social Media and Bookmarking

So the latest and greatest (or so the universe tells me) is that social media and social bookmarking is the wave of the marketing future. We're actually a tad behind ... but not too far. We should always look at what the competition is doing; and not all competition is direct. For example, the Majestic Theater on Overland Road doesn't just compete with Edwards 21 in Boise, but also Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Netflix, ice skating, mall hopping, drag racing, papier-mâché and anything else someone would do on the weekend.

So, where our the competition may not necessarily be doing social media, the rest of the world is. And, in order to make shopping at CPS easier, we are going to join the bandwagon.

Our first step to jumping on board will be to plug into the social media network. We will do this by making the pages/items/articles in our website accessible to social networks like: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Buzz Up, Google Bookmarks, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Favorites (respectively pictured below).

Here's what each one of these do:

1. Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn. There are some minor differences between these, but essentially they all allow you to connect with your friends and colleagues online. Think of these as a large Rolodex of people you know. Rather than a name and phone number on the Rolodex card you have a name, email address, photo albums, favorite songs, favorite political articles, recipes, professional projects you're working on, and whatever else your friend wants to share. You can "unfriend" your more "profane" friends if you need to.
   
2. Share Content: Digg. My wife's grandmother likes to send me newspaper clippings in the mail. Digg is one of the biggest buckets of news out there, and this is essentially what it does ... but with a twist. When grandmother Ruby sends me those articles, imagine if there was a sticky note on top that said 14,236 other people read this article and they "digged" it. I now know that there are 14,236 others that thought this article was worth reading. I don't just have to take Ruby's word for it.
   
3. Social Bookmarking: Buzz Up, Google Bookmarks, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Favorites. I want you to think about all of your favorite sites ... news sites, recipe sites, sports sites, CPS home page, or the SAM login. You've probably saved these to your favorites or bookmarks. Now imagine that all of your bookmarks are saved to where others can see what you've bookmarked. (Get it? It's social because others can get involved. Quit hogging your bookmarks to yourself! C'mon, share! Pass them around.) For the don't-stalk-me-conscious this may seem invasive, but for others it fulfills the purpose of what social media is all about ... building community with people that have similar interests. You could discover that there are 324,453 others that like rock/paper/scissor tournaments.

If there are people out there that like rock/paper/scissor tournaments (and I kid you not, I had a former colleague rank twelfth in the nation ... ask me about it), then there are definitely people out there that like packaging. And it just so happens that in just two weeks I've found 108 other people in the world, so far, who have bookmarked our site via Delicious. Those 99 other people have made notes regarding our site like (ahem):

• "Best price, ship to Canada."
• "No tall tea tins available at this site."
• "Found while searching for travel containers for our favorite spices, oils, etc."

This is incredible information. Someone shopped around and thought we had the best price and liked that we ship to Canada. Adding tall tea tins to our inventory might be a good idea. Someone found us while looking for travel-friendly containers.

Why CPS? Because there are millions of users (literally, millions) in each of these networks. (I'll admit ... I belong to each one of these. YES, I DO have friends, real friends, thank you very much.) Millions of people use these services (Facebook, Digg, etc) to:

1. Research and organize products prior to purchase
2. Read news and current events
3. Organize sites and information they find while browsing the vast Internet
   
4. Communicate with family, friends, and colleagues
5. Promote events, news, products, services and more.

By plugging in we hope to make it easier for our customers to do these 5 things with our products and brand.

Natural Trend: ALL ABOARD!

Small and mid-sized companies have jumped on board the natural trend bandwagon. The large multinational companies seem to only be entering the category via acquisitions. Estee Lauder jump started the trend in 1993 by acquiring Aveda. L'Oreal has acquired The Body shop, Kiehl's, Garnier, and Sanoflore to its portfolio in the last decade. Burt's Bees is now under the ownership of Clorox, a child of the P&G mega-family, and it has proven it can compete with the larger brands.

Multinationals acquire existing natural brands instead of launching their own because it makes more strategic sense to invest in products that have been tested and proved to be successful. These multinational mega-companies are now only responsible for marketing and promoting the brand. Let someone else pay for the research and development, right?

Adapted from Happi Magazine
Are Multinationals Missing the Natural Movement
Imogen Matthews

Decorating your package

Creating the perfect package for your product is absolutely essential to marketing your business. Once you have found the plastic container, jar or glass bottle that truly accents and compliments your product, you are well on your way to that perfect package. Without appropriate and artistic labeling, however, you will never sell your creation.

Let Container & Packaging Supply help you find and create your perfect package. After selecting the plastic container you want out of our large inventory, allow us to decorate your package. We have a variety of methods for providing your custom decoration, from the widely used silk screen process, to the new heat transfer process.

Take time to familiarize yourself with our decoration processes. In the links below, we describe what each process does and when we would recommend its use.

• Silk screen printing
• Hot stamping
• Pad printing
• Custom labels
• Sample prints