Marketing Communication - Essay Example

?Marketing Communication Table of Contents Review of the Case 3 Link between the Case and Relevant Theories 5 Case Study 9 Theory and the Case 9 Questions on the Case Study 10 Reference 14 Bibliography 16 Article Summary Review of the Case The article is based on the case how SBS has come out with a successful way to find its audience for a documentary TV series. The client actually wanted to reach out its clients directly rather than looking out for the audiences to actively turn on SBS on TV. The engagement was given to the agency called as ‘The Dubs’, a digital engagement agency. The agency introduced this innovative documentary series ‘Goa Hippy Tribes’ on a social networking site, Facebook. The project was built with a support from the Australian filmmaker, Darius Devas. The inclusion of Devas was important as he had already travelled to Goa, India. He was allowed to document the reunion of his old friends who were there as part of Goa hippy Mecca in the 1970s. The documentary was built by collecting response from the significant personalities which were key in the entire story. At the first stage, the Dubs has come up with 13 video vignettes on the platform of Facebook. This was done on a regular basis throughout the months of March and April, 2010. The platform was chosen in the wake of customers’ growing attraction towards the online content. The project was an effort by the leading broadcast medium SBS, Freehand Television, Screen Australia and Screen NSW. The strategy was implemented in two stages. At the first stage, the Facebook Group was considered to attract the audiences. At the later stage, the Facebook fan page was included to communicate with the target audiences. The project started off with the introduction of ‘Goa Hippy Tribe’, an online community to connect the relevant people and communities. The community page put its effort to be linked and associated with the audience group who is passionate about the group and emotionally tied up with the Goa hippy community. The videos were related to certain themes like drug subculture, young age spirituality and trance music which can be associated with the Goa. Furthermore, the Dubs also used other media platforms like YouTube and Flickr to push its product to additional audiences. The project was a success as there was audience engagement in the making of this documentary TV series. As the people felt that they were actually involved in the making of the process. The loyalty was enormous with the feel of joint ownership. The audience base also increased through word of mouth communication. At the end stage, after the documentary was done, a fan page was created to reach out to a larger audience group. Through the group and fan page, the project was able to reach out to 9000 fans without spending a dollar on traditional marketing or advertising on air. Traditionally in a documentary film, there is enough research involved with a considerable number of interview processes. These are never released to the audiences (Tay, 2010). However, as those were released and were used to shape up the documentary films, people felt connected to the making process of the same leading to an emotional feeling and passion for the documentary series. Facebook also allowed the audience sot take part in the group discussion for this project leading to fetching a considerable attraction from its fans. This feeling of involvement was possible through Facebook and led to the success of the documentary series. Link between the Case and Relevant Theories Communication is one unique activity which establishes the relationship. The communication has been central to the integrative marketing process. Dunca and Moriaty have come up with a communication based marketing model to manage the relationships. They developed a model displaying the significance of communication in the foundation of the marketing efforts. The communication seems to be one of the most significant elements of the marketing leading to the establishment of the brand relationships with enhanced brand value. (Source: Kull, n.d.) The above model shows that how the messages on a communication platform enhance the interactivity with the stakeholders resulting in enhanced brand value. In today’s contemporary business environment, the communication has been one of the significant elements to interact with the clients. There are a number of macro environmental factors which shape up the strategy of an organization to promote the marketing communication of it products. In this perspective, technological factors have been pretty significant to shape up the strategies of the companies. With the increasing usage of internet, this platform has become as one of the desired media to promote the products and services. The technological environment has experienced huge changes in the last few decades. With the changes in the surrounding environment, the organizations are also expected to align its strategies along with the same, which is pretty visible from the following figure. Furthermore, internet is one medium, communication on which is easy and comparably less expensive. There is another model ‘Porter’s Five Forces’ which also helps to frame up the competitive environment of any organization and drives to many such strategies adopted by the organization. In the case, SBS is in the media and entertainment business, whether the buyers’ power is pretty high. They are the decider whether an entertainment series would do well or face a failure. Apart from that, the viewers or the audiences would not incur any cost to switch from one entertainment channel to another one. So, overall it is pretty significant for the companies in this business to be in good terms with the audiences. Communication is one significant element which can help the companies to build relationships with its viewers. Social networking sites are increasingly becoming one of the significant media to connect with the target consumers. Even in the recent years, the social networking websites have experienced a continual growth in the number of visitors. A study carried out by Nielsen has revealed that from the year 2005 till 2006, the visitor traffic has experienced a growth of 47 %. The following figure supports the same fact. (Source: marketing Leadership Council, 2008) SBS has taken the advantage of such social networking sites to connect to the target audiences for its documentary film. The ‘Goa Hippy Tribe’ have allowed the people to emotionally connect with each other as well as the documentary videos as these involved the interviews and experiences of them. Moreover, the communication was promoted through comments, discussion and connection to other significant platforms like YouTube, Flickr etc. Case Study Theory and the Case In this contemporary business environment, international marketing communication has become one significant weapon to attract a large customer base. “Manufacturer identified the mass media as the vehicle to stimulate demand and began to make use of advertising in two distinct ways” (Egan, 2007). Mass media like television and films are used considerably to air the advertisements and to reach out target customers (Hughes & Fill, 2007). The organizations have come up with two innovative ways to promote their product brands. Seeing the brands utilized by the well known personalities would be able to influence the consumers in a comparatively better way. Another significant strategy, ‘in-your-face’ advertisements are also gaining importance where the brands are shown in between the television shows. However, there are both advantages and disadvantages of both the advertisements. One can escape the advertisement breaks; however, while watching television shows or movies, the viewers would have no choice but to watch the product brands displayed through ‘product placement’ strategy. On the other hand, it can happen that the viewers missed on the products used during the TV shows as they are less visible than those aired during the advertisement breaks. Standalone ‘in-your-face’ advertisements are more visible than those shown in the TV series or films. Two examples are given in the referred case. In the Seinfeld Sitcom, the boxes of Kellogg’s cornflakes had been placed within the kitchen. This is a ‘product placement’ strategy of Kellogg. On the other hand, Abu Dhabi’s Hydra Properties sponsored ‘The Hydra Executive’ and the entire show was based around this bran. This is an example of ‘in-your-face’ strategy of advertisements. Questions on the Case Study 1. Watch two reality shows in your region. What brands are featured on these programs? Do they use a product placement or an in-your-face strategy? MasterChef Australia and Australia Idol are two significant reality shows aired on Australian television. In MasterChef Australia brands like Apple, Hitachi, Harvey Norman, Coles, Bosch, MacLean’s and several other brands are showed through ‘in-your-face’ strategy. In the episode aired on 29 April, 2010, at the starting one of the contestants was seen working on the Apple Mackintosh computer. In the same episode, another contestant operated a Hitachi power saw. It is to note that none of these brands are their official partners. In another episode aired on May 4, 2010, Coles was seen to supply the required ingredients to the pantry of MasterChef. These advertisements are the examples of ‘product placement’ strategy. It was reported that the sales of Coles surge due to its advertisement on MasterChef (Sinclair, 2010). On the other hand, product brands like McDonald’s, Mazda, Cadbury Schweppes and Head & Shoulders sponsor programs like Australian Idol. All these products are aired during the commercial break of the episodes. All these brands adopted ‘in-your-face’ strategy to reach out their customers. 2. Do traditional advertising agencies support advertising in video games and reality television? Conduct a study to address this question. What are some of the leading agencies serving these advertising niches? Which agencies would you use and why? Traditionally, the advertise organizations did not pay the video game makers for the product placement. Rather, most of the deals were taken as to explore the cross promotional opportunities. Even, in some cases, the game makers paid off the license fees to utilize the popularity of the real products to make the products more realistic. In the recent times, there are companies which have travelled long from the traditional advertising techniques to the advertisements on the television, video games and other digital media. Some of the leading advertisement dealing with these are emitch, The Brand Agency, Compulsive, Market Force, Carat Australia and Maxus Australia etc. I would like to use an agency which is rich in creativity and comfortable placing the products on air as well as on the video games. I would look out for the agency which has achievements and experience in this specific field with an enhanced understanding of the industry. MarketForce has been able to fetch several achievements with its vast experience in the traditional as well as digital advertisements (MarketForce, n.d.). Compulsive is another advertisement agency which has specialized its service in digital media and has served world renowned brands like Adidas (Compulsive, n.d.). 3. Observe some video games that feature advertisements. What types of products and brands are typically featured? Does this communication method target a certain demographic group? Discuss. Products like donuf, kfc are regularly aired on several computer games including The Simpsons Game and Disney Games. There are videogames like Everquest where the players are able to order pizza from Pizza Hut from the game itself. In CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder, Visa shows off by providing a fraud protection service to alert the players on credit cards stolen. Sometimes, these video games allow the rotation of the advertisements leading to the flaunting of number of brands on each time those games is played (Gutnik et. al., 2007). As these video games are mainly meant for the children and the youth, the product brands also target this specific demographic group. 4. Make a list of other types of products and/or brands that can use these new methods of communication as pert of their overall IMC strategy. Why do you think they could be successful in using these approaches? There are many such product brands which can be aired on television, films or on video games and are expected to reap good results. However, this would depend on the types of television series or on the level of video games. For an instance, in the cooking reality shows, products like kitchen appliances, raw food suppliers, household appliances are expected to raise more attraction, while in other series like interviews with significant personalities, singing , dancing reality shows product brands like automobile, electronics, apparels are expected to attract more consumers. Food retail chains can flaunt off in the video games to attract more young people. Furthermore, toy manufacturers, electronic goods like cell phone, iPods can also flaunt their advertisements on the video games considering the level of the same. Reference Compulsive. No Date. Clients. http://www.compulsive.com.au/ (accessed April 14, 2010). Egan, J. 2007. Marketing Communications. London: Thomson Learning. Gutnik, L., Huang, T., Lin, B. & Schmidt, T. 2007. New Trends in Product Placement. http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Courses/StratTech09/Tech/Preso/D-placement.doc (accessed April 13, 2010). Hughes, G. & Fill, C. 2007. Marketing Communications. USA: Butterworth-Heinemann. Kull, K. No Date. The Model of Internet Based Marketing Communication. http://www.mattimar.ee/publikatsioonid/ettevottemajandus/2004/06_Kull.pdf (accessed April 13, 2010). Marketing Leadership Council. 2008. Leveraging Social Networking Sites in Marketing. http://www.blueplanetstudio.com/images/Newsletter/Leveraging-Social-Media-Networking-Sites-in-Marketing-Communications.pdf (accessed April 13, 2010). MarketForce. No Date. Awards. http://marketforce.com.au/awards.asp (accessed April 13, 2010). Sinclair, L. 2010. MasterChef sparks Coles sales surge. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/masterchef-sparks-coles-sales-surge/story-e6frg996-1225882021805 (accessed April 13, 2010). Tay, R. W. 2010. SBS dabbles in Facebook only documentary 'Goa Hippy Tribe'. http://www.digital-media.net.au/article/sbs-dabbles-in-facebook-only-documentary-goa-hippy-tribe/513366.aspx (accessed April 13, 2010). Bibliography Busch, R., Seidenspinner, M. & Unger, F. 2007. Marketing communication policies. New York: Springer. Read More