Reflection: Week 13

Tuesday:

Marketers can communicate through many different channels

We began Tuesday’s class by recalling what we know about the marketing communication process. A few weeks ago, we analyzed a Burger King advertisement and identified the sender/encoder, signal, decoder/receiver, and noise. Then, Dr. Spotts showed us a series of advertisements and asked us to decode the message. We were able to decode the message for a company like Apple, but we were unable to decode a series of advertisements for Silk Cut, a British cigarette company. The reason we were unable to decode the messages of those advertisements is because we did not share a field of experience with the encoder. Ultimately, the encoder/sender and the decoder/receiver must share a field of experience in order for the message of the advertisement to be understood.

We then switched gears and watched a commercial for Old Spice body wash. The commercial used incongruity, which is seeing things that should not be seen together, to grab the viewer’s attention. The commercial featured three main scenes: (1) a bathroom/shower (2) a boat, which is a testament to Old Spice’s history and (3) a horse on the beach. The man on a horse at the end of the commercial is an example of a tactic known as recency. People will remember the man on the horse because it is the last thing they saw related to the product. Old Spice uses this tactic in the hopes that when a customer is walking down the hygiene product isle at a store, the customer will try the produce because they recognize it. If you are interested in viewing the video, I have provided it below: 

In thinking about who the commercial is trying to reach, it is obvious that Old Spice is trying to appeal to women. Old Spice is playing off the stereotype that women do the household shopping. Old Spice tried to gain the interest of women by emphasizing that “their man will feel like a man” when they use Old Spice. The commercial also makes several comments that are directed towards women. For example, the man in the commercial makes mention of the tickets to “that thing you really want to go to”. Then, the tickets turn to diamonds, stereotypically a girl’s best friend.

After concluding our discussion about the Old Spice commercial, we transitioned into a discussion about the three main purposes of marketing communication. The three main purposes are:

Informing

Persuading

Connecting

We achieve these marketing communication goals through tools that deliver messages to our target market. Those tools are known as the Promotional Mix. The Promotional Mix includes public relations, personal selling, direct sales, advertising, branding, and many other tools.

The four P's of marketing are product, place, price, and PROMOTION

In introducing these tools, we distinguished between advertising and publicity. Advertising is promotion of a product or service created internally. Advertising is always positive because it is created by the company, for the company. Publicity is, classically, media coverage such as the news and magazines. Publicity is outside an advertiser’s control. Because of that, it can be positive or negative. Public Relations can be thought of as the balance between advertising and publicity. Public Relations are managed internally in a company and try to respond to negative publicity.

The final concept we discussed in class is the AIDA Model, which aids an organization in achieving their promotional goals. The steps of the AIDA model are (1) awareness (2) interest (3) desire and finally (4) action. It is important to think about how the AIDA model impacts our SMART project because we are introducing a new product to the market place. If we are unable to gain interest in the product, how will it ever succeed?

Thursday:

Thursday morning before class, the business students in my SMART project group met to work on the Brand Strategy Memo due next Tuesday. We also plan to meet with our marketing consultant over the weekend so that she can provide us with feedback. 

Thursday’s class was a workshop. We were given autonomy to work on our projects as we saw fit. We did, however, have to make sure that the poster was complete by the end of the class period. After playing around with the color scheme and format, we have finally finished our poster!

Looking Forward:

We have a lot of work to do on the SMART project and only two weeks before the engineering expo takes place! As mentioned, the business students are going to be working on finishing up the Brand Strategy Memo with the help of our marketing consultant. The engineers are going to finish assembling the product. Together, we are all going to come up with a 60-90 second pitch and practice, practice, practice!