The use of unusual creative tactics in TV commercials which have little relevance to the product or service being advertised and why creative personnel in agencies advocate and defend their use.
Since most television commercials rely heavily on very unusual creative tactics, creative personnel in agencies always have to defend their use of these tactics. In most cases, their defense is met by some criticism. To measure the strength and weaknesses of their arguments, one needs to look at the results of the use of unusual creative tactics. The rationale is that there will not be any positive result if they are not effective, but since more and more unusual creative tactics are being created each passing day across the world, it shows they achieve the desired effect. One of these tactics that help cut through the usual clutter is the use of PR stunts in television commercials, (McKenna, 1991 p. 65-70).
For instance, a golfer who enters the Guinness Book of Records for teeing across the Himalayas for 90 days would attract lots of media, such as CNN, BBC, NBC, and other online and offline media, thus being an effective marketing tool if it is done by a company, while the budget would be exceedingly low compared to the result. Since most of these unusual creative tactics utilize cutting-edge digital technology, they can influence the customer or consumer as they creatively create one of the most memorable brand experiences. The most significant advantage of these tactics is that they target small sizes, which is an advantage. Entrepreneurs and small organizations can market and receive publicity easily as compared to large companies. Even huge companies can engineer these tactics and capture even small markets.
These tactics are also formulated in such a way that they make a direct pitch while seemingly solving a problem, or just offer a unique product for a better price (Fallon & Sinn, 2006 p. 77). The most fundamental advantage of these unusual tactics is that they make use of human psychology imbued in creativity rather than judgment, guesswork, or experience. For instance, the Honda Accord advert depicts a series of creative aspects that are eye-catching and very motivating towards considering such a vehicle as a perfect emblem of ingenuity. The advert attractively makes use of technology while it’s one of its selling points. A significant disadvantage is on the efforts required to improve the commercial if need be, costing lots of money since it has to be re-shot, re-edited and another script created. Some of these unusual creative tactics sometimes fail to sell the product to the consumer, thus being a waste of money and innovation.
Role of integrated marketing communications in the brand-building process and how marketers are changing the way they build strong brands with two (2) examples from 2009 or 2010.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) plays a huge part in the brand-building process. It is spread through different levels within a firm where they materialize as the major part of the brand strategy that requires extensive development in a firm before starting extensive public brand communication. Marketing today is evolving towards evolutionary and dynamic processes, based on service-centered views, (Duncan, 2002 p. 45). To be at par with such an evolution, suggestions are rife that IMC must be used instead of limited-focus tools in the line of promotion while brand management has to be brought into focus to maintain and initiate a continuing interaction with the customer as relationships are enhanced.
Strategic integrated brand communication could easily help a business to move ahead in a competitive environment. For a super brand to be achieved, promotional communications should always focus on associating the promoted brand with what the customer is already aware of and has fond associations. IMC does represent the clear voice of the promoted brand as well as being the means a company establishes a dialogue with end-users concerning the commodity. IMC provides the right means towards the strong development of customer-based brand equity, while at the same time elicits favorable responses from the customers (McKenna, 1991 p. 86). Marketers have ascertained IMCs focus on brand building through creations of specific and unique databases, which then monitor and continuously respond to market needs, fostering relationships existing between practices and consumers at the same time.
Hosford-Dunn (2006) has the idea that Integrated Marketing Communications during the process of building a specific brand is stressed towards creating profitable transactions. This is achieved through critical selection and the serious adoption of relationships in building and strengthening premium brands as well as maximizing profits. In 2010, the Coca Cola Company, the biggest drinks company in the world, entered into strategic IMC to foster its brand and strengthen brand loyalty through entrenchment in the 2010 FIFA World Cup as the official promoter. It also has elaborate Soccer promotions across the world to discover new talent while at the same time promoting its image to all corners of the world, such as in the UK (Coca Cola Championship) and South American Soccer. In the same breath, Pepsi has also launched a social media campaign aiming at fostering promotional deals such as promoting the Major North American Professional Sports Leagues.
Discuss the methods used to measure television viewing audiences. Do you believe that the measurement methods being used are yielding reliable and valid estimates of television program audiences? How might these methods be improved?
There are different ways of measuring television-viewing audiences. Broadly, there are two main technologies used in measuring viewership and audience patterns. These are Return Path Panel and People Meter technologies.
People Meter Technology uses People Meters, devices used in the measuring of television viewing habits of people, and households within a specific sample. It measures the media in use and by whom, giving detailed data that is constantly updated on the viewership patterns that are then matched with the audience’s demographic characteristics. What happens is that a household member registers their presence by pushing an identification button within a People’s meter handset. Once an individual has stopped watching, they press the button once more. The information on viewership and the audience is then stored within the People Meter and transmitted at night through radio transmitters or telephone lines to a central repository.
The limitations of People Meters are that they require people to re-register and register while watching television, leaving room for human error. Measurement cost technique can be increased in environments where the audience size is low. To counter these, measures can be put to motivate many people to continue with the audience measure by preaching on their benefits.
In the case of a Portable People Meter (PPM), it allows the exposure of an individual to certain media to be measured, both TV and Radio outside and within homes. PPM, a passive device the size of a mobile phone or pager, detects specific codes, Media embedded, thus identify the content and platform that a person is exposed to. It is worn by people throughout the day just like a pager. The data is then transmitted to a certain central repository while within the recharging unit. Its main benefits are its portability, which measures all media exposed to it while measuring both radio and TV signals. Amidst carrying around, there is no other thing required of the audience.
The main limitations include the fact that higher numbers of people have to be sampled because of low participation. Such factors as noise, mismatching issues, and equalization affect the device’s ability to read the relayed signals. It can be harnessed and improved by giving out many devices to a wider sample to capture more data while sensitizing the importance of such an undertaking for more participation.
Explain the concept of an evoked set, why is the concept important to marketers? Provide examples of two (2) evoked sets and explain how marketers attempt to influence consumers to gain consideration.
Evoked Set’ is a concept in marketing that is based on the presumption that consumers hardly consider each brand within a distinct category of products before deciding on a purchase. Thus, typical consumers then choose from certain main and specific brand numbers making up an evoked set. It is regarded as brand numbers in a category of products that are considered by a consumer while choosing a certain brand. Most marketers forget that brands within a certain ‘evoked set’ occasion a process of routine elimination of other distinct products towards the final choice.
The concept is very significant to marketers since for their products to be bought, it has to be within the handful of possible choices that come within the mind of the consumer faced with a buying decision (McKenna 1991 p. 98). There is a lot that marketers learn through the determination of roles that evoked set or knowledge of evaluated brands play during the purchase decisions of distinct consumers. What marketers have come to learn as significant is the fact that an evoked set concept if all factors remain constant, prior knowledge of a specific product and favorable attitudes influences the product preference of a consumer. For instance, if a person is looking for notebook computers, he or she will have certain brands at the top of their minds, such as Dell or Toshiba. This means that in your mind you already have an idea of what you are looking for. In case one’s products make such a selection shortlist, they will be easily evaluated and purchased by the target customers. marketers should know products fail to enter within the lines of a customer’s evoked set mostly because they are not deciphered, or they were at one time known but at the moment forgotten or just by rejection by the potential users as being simply unsatisfactory or just inappropriate.
To remain within an evoked set, marketers make their communication programs to continually maintain the perfect level of mind share with prospects and customers while continuing with the building of the brand image and perception, leading to a good customer relationship and purchases (Duncan, 2002 p. 76). Through Integrated Marketing Communications, marketers can influence customers by introducing their products to customer’s evoked sets and occasionally reminding them of the products.
Direct marketing has been plagued by several problems that have tarnished its image. Discuss some of these problems and what might be done to improve the image of direct marketing.
In direct marketing, the audience is reached without the use of such traditional formal advertising channels such as radio, TV, and newspapers. Instead, messages reach consumers through such means as letters, emails, and catalogs. Direct marketing also involves the use of fliers and street advertisements. Some problems face Direct Marketing that leads to the tarnishing of its image. This is inclusive of negative criticism within direct marketing efforts, where they generate unwanted and tarnishing solicitations, mostly not eluded to the method of communication, but mostly because of compiling very poorly demographic databases.
Advertisers hardly wish to waste their promotional funds to communicate with those consumers who are not interested in any of their products. These problems facing direct marketing have been created mostly by lack of customer respect, mostly their privacy, leading to a negative response from the customers. They are no longer seen as being important or carrying any meaningful communication but a bother. In cases of direct mails, there is a high chance of users receiving irrelevant mail in large numbers, which mostly materialize as spam. Most consumers have been at the forefront of demanding that direct marketing be ended for environmental and privacy reasons.
The main thing is to find a way of reducing the advertising budget while increasing the possibility and ability to deliver a specific premeditated marketing message, towards a customer interested in information regarding such product or service. Another problem facing direct marketing is a lack of knowledge as well as the steps to be followed to carry out a successful direct marketing campaign. While the result is ineffective and expensive campaigns, the targeted customers are left hating such marketing campaigns.
These businesses forget that setting up a successful direct marketing campaign requires the setting up of several processes of interlinked marketing. Systems of superb direct marketing should not be taken as hard to come up with, since some are relatively inexpensive in times of implementation. If one needs to motivate a company and promote product image in direct marketing, what is crucial is to introduce mechanisms that cost less while being rather easy to pull through. From here, any profit or money that is generated can be used to bring into the picture other methods that might be expensive or sophisticated.
Explain what is meant by the terms of cause-related advertising and advocacy advertising. Discuss one (1) example of an organization that has used each of these strategies. Do these strategies work? Why/ why not.
Cause-related advertising is the promotion of a business through advertising while concurrently providing support to one’s favorite non-profit event or organization. This is possible since there is a joint link between fundraising and company sales in the advertisements strategy, for example, giving a certain percentage of revenue from company sales to a charity event or a certain public cause. To distinguish it (cause-related advertising) from philanthropy, money spent in a cause-related advertising effort is considered as an expense and expected to bring a return. Cause-related marketing builds a better positive and strong image for a company, while a charity event achieves greater visibility and novel funding sources (Petty & Schumann, 1983 p.55). For example, at one time the American Express donated a single cent towards the Statue of Liberty maintenance and restoration for each card bought and used. Overall, the restoration received 1.7 million dollars while the campaign produced a 28 percent increase in card usage. These depict the effectiveness of this strategy, where for instance a company’s pledge to donate a percentage of money to an earthquake cause for every purchase of its products will gain momentum, as people get motivated to buy to contribute towards the calamity.
Advocacy promotion has its priorities on consumer groups or the media, while sometimes it also incorporates company competitors, agitators of political change, or certain governmental agencies. In such advertisements whose goal is to propagate ideas or just elucidate specific social issues entrenched in controversy as well as having some public importance though, in essence, it supports the sponsor’s interests. A good example is what Mobil Oil Company (in the year 1974) advocated via supporting and calling for offshore drilling so that it could alleviate the looming fuel crisis in that period. Apart from the NBC channel, the energy company’s commercials were seen as very chaotic and controversial and brushed aside by other channels. This made Mobil Oil purchase a couple of full-pages in the local newspapers to reproduce in printed text adverts as well as obvious visuals and details of the now controversial commercial.
In this regard, the advertisements are placed by organizations or companies thus presenting their specific opinions concerning a set or one public issue. The adverts show the Oil Company’s individual opinion engineered towards influencing the opinion of everyone affected by the energy crisis. Since most of them represent the wishes of the public, such as consumer rights, taxation, health, environment, and education, issues that affect consumers’ every day, advocacy advertising is considered successful.
How can companies marketing their products in another country avoid some of the communications problems that might arise because of differences due to language and culture? Discuss two (2) recent examples that illustrate your argument.
Companies marketing their services and products internationally are faced with myriad communication problems. This is because of differences in culture and language. The culture of a person affects their preferences in certain commodities where individuals might be influenced by culture to ignore certain commodities. Language comes as a factor when the targeted international audience uses a different language standard, different from the one a company uses, say from North America, India, or China. To reach such wide markets, companies have to break the barriers of language and culture (Petty & Schumann, 1983 p.87).
To avoid language differences, a company has to translate its marketing information to reach its target audience. However, the company must also avoid mistakes in marketing translation. An organization could spend lots of resources towards creating the perfect marketing paraphernalia and commodities only to have these materials translated rather carelessly into the language being targeted. It will be full of blunders and unforgivable language errors. Since such issues as distinct assumptions, structures of language, and cultural values, translating meaningful is not easy thus; any translation shouldn’t be the work of a single person. Using ‘decentering’, multiple translators are used, where one person first translates the text from language A to B, then a second translator who has no idea what the text in Language A said translates from B to A. To deal with language barriers, different companies use the local language fully in all their work. For instance, Coca Cola and Google make use of Local languages in China, Korea, and Japan, while they use English in North America and the United Kingdom.
When it comes to culture, the inherent tenets of different cultural surroundings must be held with lots of care. Culture causes problems in marketing as it is vague and difficult to comprehend. It is easier to violate the norms of another culture in a foreign country without one’s knowledge. This could affect a marketing campaign and the reception of a new product. For example, when a bank wants to enter into a Muslim market, introducing a system of banking that is Sharia (Muslim Norms) compliant would incorporate the new culture, which hardly entertains interest accrual, otherwise, the same culture could make such a bank fail in its marketing and profitability.
Explain what is meant by the term relationship marketing. Why is it so important for companies to engage in this practice? Discuss at least two (2) examples from 2009 or 2010.
Relationship marketing represents a form of marketing that was developed from campaigns of direct marketing response that emphasize satisfaction and customer retention and not on focusing dominantly on sales transactions (Christopher & Ballantyne, 1991 p. 86). Relationship marketing occurs uniquely during its practice, through being different from other types of avid marketing since it’s able to know values of longer customer relationships as well as extending communication above sales promotion and intrusive advertising content.
The move towards mobile and online platforms has led to the improvement of relationship marketing facets as technology keeps on improving and opening up, while being collaborative as channels of social interaction and communication keeps on gaining immense popularity. Companies have thus no choice but to adopt this kind of novel channels of relationship marketing that the new technology seems to favor, more so if they want to remain more relevant.
Social channels that everybody is talking about or where everybody seems to be is the right place for a company to make an entry while remaining relevant and clearly in the mind of those people within such a channel. Towards this, a lot has to be adopted by companies, such as including tools related to relationship management with one’s customers, which rise above simple customer services and facets of demographic data. In the area of relationship marketing, most marketers have to extend towards the inclusion of efforts related to inbound marketing. This includes strategic combinations of content and searches optimization, social media, Application Development, and Public Relations.
Satisfaction is a major concern of relationship marketing since it relies mostly on the acquisition of requirements of a consumer and their communication from those customers inexistent (Christopher & Ballantyne, 1991 p. 97). As much as groups that are targeted within relationship marketing could be large, overall relevancy and communication accuracy do remain high more than seen in direct marketing. The main tenet in relationship marketing is retention, something marketers have to remember, done through various means as well as practices, ensuring repeated trade that emanates from customers still preexisting and satisfying their needs better than competitors, via a mutually beneficial relationship.
Perfect relationship marketing examples in 2009 and 2010 and still gaining momentum are Facebook and Twitter. They have brought different people from different backgrounds and geographical locations together thus providing a perfect platform for marketers to utilize such as Multi-Level Marketers do with the two social media.
References
Christopher, P. & Ballantyne, K. (1991) Relationship Marketing: Bringing Quality, Customer Service and Marketing Together. Oxford, Butterworth Heineman.
Duncan, T. (2002) IMC: Using advertising and promotion to build brand. New York, McGraw Hill/Irwin.
Fallon, P. & Senn, F. (2006) Juicing the Orange: How to turn creativity into a powerful business advantage. Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing.
Hosford-Dunn, H. (2006)“Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), Part I – CRM: The Ginsu Knife for Marketing”, Audiology Online, Article 1630. Web.
McKenna, R. (1991) Marketing is Everything, Harvard Business Review, pp 65-70.
Petty, R., Cacioppo, J. & Schumann, D. (1983) Central and peripheral routes to advertising effectiveness: The moderating role of involvement. Journal of Consumer Research 10(2):46-153.