Blue Advertising Campaign - Case Study Example

? "Blue" Advertising Campaign "Blue" Advertising Campaign Advertising aims at convincing people to purchase either goods or services by a certain brand. For any organization to make a sale, it has to conduct some form of advertising. Categorization of advertising mainly is on the intended results of the advert, which is how well the advert manages to convince people to purchase a particular brand and not the others. Thus, persuasive advertising aims at persuading people to purchase a product or service. For Blue commercials, the main aim is persuading pet owners to use their food to feed their pets. To consider an advert as successful, it must have achieved its purpose; in this case, persuading target market to purchase a product or a service. Methods settled by the company in selling their ideas mostly depend on the main intentions of the advert and the target audience. While some advertisements suit best in the print media, others suit best in the visual media. This is the main reason why different companies exhaustively use a particular form of advertising; but seemingly ignoring the rest. Blue advertisements specifically target the visual media, and to a large extent television commercials. In this essay, I will conduct a case study of the Blue advertising TV commercials, exploring their influence on the people and how well they succeed in persuading people to purchase the brand. Blue pet food is one of the recent brands on an ad campaign aimed at persuading customers to purchase their products. Discussing the qualities and characteristics of the foods to the people, while using previous customers as witnesses to the quality of these foods, Blue definitely captures the attention of every pet owner, convincing them to try their brand (“Blue.com”, 2013). Entirely, this case study majors on Blue pet food brand, making an analysis of its ads’ influence on the people as well as how they perceive Blue after watching the commercials. Creativity in Advertising According to McStay (2013), for any advert to capture the attention of the target customers, it has to possess high creative values. Creativity makes an advert unique from other adverts, capturing the attention of the people and the target group (McStay, 2013). Thus, the more creative an ad is, the more the likelihood of that ad selling the information to the audience. Not only should creativity in an ad focus the target market only, it should focus on all people; any person can be a customer. The making of Blue ads as all-round ads increases the number of potential customers won. Many people define creativity as the art of simplifying something that is complicated for people to understand. In advertising, creativity serves the main purpose of fulfilling psychological, marketing and corporate needs of the customers (McStay, 2013). By creatively making their adverts, Blue adds new perceptions and enjoyments to the products. For an advert to qualify as a creative piece, it has to motivate the customers, prompting them to buy the particular product or service on offer. In essence, it should prompt them to make a purchase, whether they had planned to purchase or not. Creativity in adverting as demonstrated by Blue pets’ food brand in their ad campaign should be memorable to the people. The company seeks to prove that they provide the best content to the customers. In fact, every episode in their ad campaign aims at pulling the mind of the customers to purchase their products. Not only is this creative, it acts as a means of persuading the people that Blue food is the best that they can provide to their dogs. Through the nature of their ads, Blue creates an impression that pets, both cats and dogs are part of the family, something rather odd. How is this possible, yet they are animals? In their stream of ads, Blue points out that our pets spend a lot of time with us, making them part of us. They thus require special food, specially prepared for our other family members (“Blue.com”, 2013). Strategically, this acts as a way of persuading people to try their food. Interestingly, acts as a sure way of challenging people in the way they treat their pets. Who of the pet owners, with much love for her dog or cat, would hate being associated with a brand advocating for pets’ rights? Confidentiality of Advertisements An advert should possess confidence. Information that the advert hopes to sell to the people should possess high confidentiality levels, which acts as an assurance to the target group that the advert represents a strong brand (Boush et al, 2009). This has potentially won customer’s trust in Blue as a brand. Blue dares customers to take part in the “True Blue Test”, a test that seeks to prove that to them that this is the most preferable brand available in the market. No other brand in the pet industry has thought of introducing such a feature in their campaigns. Definitely, people take part in the test, and leave their comments on their findings. If a brand, offering high quality products to its customers at a reasonable price dares its customers to take part in their test and rate them, this shows how confident they are about their products. Purposively, this wins the hearts of many pet owners. Advantages of Persuasive Advertising to Blue as a Brand Tyagi & Kumar (2004) argue that persuasion in advertising acts as a way of pleading with the customers to make a consideration of the particular products and services on offer. In its very own sense, advertising aims at making a sale to the people. Through persuasion, Blue pleads with the customers to purchase their products using a strong image and presentation techniques. In particular occasions, this form of advertising also inspires the customers. If Blue was to advertise all about making a sale, then persuasion to them is the means by which the brand gets there. Illogical and irrational promises cannot convince a customer asserts Boush et al (2009). Neither can a lie act as a means of convincing customers (Boush et al, 2009). Instead, smart marketers win utmost respect from customers in two main ways. One of these means is by delivering a product’s quality exactly as the advert describes. The second way is by use of honest advertising. Any brand taking this route in its advertising campaign has more to gain than loose by convincing its customers. As Blue portrays in their adverts, their campaign dares people to take a test of their products and ascertain their quality. McGuire's Matrix Model Blue uses the McGuire matrix model that affects people’s attitudes and beliefs. In this matrix model, five steps changes people’s attitudes and beliefs towards Blue. Although there is the existence of exceptions in the sequence to the events, he argues that these outcomes occur in order (Tyagi & Kumar, 2004). The first step is attention. Defined as the process through which members of the audience receive an encoded message, this step includes reception of the message as well as the cognitive awareness of the existence of the message (Tyagi & Kumar, 2004). Blue TV commercials target this plan with the manner in which they create the awareness of their advertisements, both online and in the television. The method of delivery too makes sure that the audience is aware that these adverts exists in their midst. The second step is comprehension, which defines the process through which the audience successfully decodes the encoded message in Blue’s commercials. The third step, yielding, portrays the acceptance of the message’s conclusions and recommendations. Retention, which is the fourth step of the process, ensures that people retain, remember and internalize the outcome of the yielding, which is necessary for the communication process to have a practical impact on the people (Tyagi & Kumar, 2004). Essentially, people cannot act on the information they receive due to a number of reasons. This necessitates the need for the retention of the message. This is a characteristic defining Blue TV commercials. Watching one of their episodes, it sticks to their minds, especially because of the graphics and the quality of the production and choice of casting (“Blue.com” 2013). In various instances, some of the episodes resemble a movie scene, a reason why they people can easily remember them more. Finally, the last step of the entire process is action. People engage in overt behaviour as recommended in a communicated message in this manner. If people retain message from Blue TV commercials, they definitely act on them at their own convenience. This means that the advert successfully meets its needs and target. Beliefs Model Persuading a particular group of people is not a walk in the park. The main persuasion model applied by Blue advertising team has four components, all linked together. Armstrong (2010) points out that every advert should focus on the beliefs of the target audience. Successfully influencing the beliefs of the people leads to the changes in their attitudes. A change in people’s attitudes subsequently imparts on the intentions of the people. Finally, this changes people’s behaviour. In Blue’s campaign, a change of behaviour means changing buying patterns of pets’ owners so that they opt for their brand instead of the other. This, in the persuasive model, means manipulating people’s beliefs (O'Keefe, 2006). According to O'Keefe (2006), the main results of a motivated lot are that they hold the correct attitudes about a brand. Further, Armstrong (2010) argues that despite the fact that people want to hold correct attitudes, cognitively, they are misers, and only think when motivated to think. Persuasive arguments, non-content or peripheral cues and motivations to think about the persuasive message are the variables associated with a persuasive messages Armstrong (2010), contained in the Blue campaign. Variables affecting motivation and people’s ability to process Blue’s message in a relatively objective manner does so either by reducing or enhancing argument scrutiny. Variables affecting the processing of Blue commercials message in a relatively biased manner produce either favourable or unfavourable motivational bias to the issue relevant to the thoughts attempted by the commercials. A reduction in people’s motivation or their thinking ability about Blue’s persuasive message, the importance of peripheral cues increases, and becomes the more important determinants of the success of the Blue commercials (Armstrong, 2010). Attitude change that results from centralized thinking about Blue commercial arguments is more persistent. Such becomes better predictors of behaviour, making them more resistant to counter persuasion than attitude change that results mostly from reactions based on peripheral cues. This means that these commercials successfully meet their purpose, persuading pet owners. Elaboration Likelihood Model The Elaboration Likelihood Model developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo describes persuasive communication as having two routes to pet owners, i.e. a central route and a peripheral route (O'Keefe, 2006). Cognitive elaboration characterizes the central route and occurs when pet owners deeply focus on the central features of the Blue commercials. This route posits that when people centrally process this information, they candidly evaluate arguments contained in the Blue adverts, ponder on the implications that the brand’s ideas and relate the provided information to their own knowledge and values. The main advantage with the central route is that persuasion goes beyond the short term yielding and to the level of retention, and overt behavior. Its major disadvantage however is the difficulties in inducing the pet owners with desire of engaging in the cognitive effort significant enough to induce a persuasive argument (O'Keefe, 2006). The peripheral route on the other hand has a different analogy. Instead of issue related arguments as suggested by the centralized route, peripheral route majors on a quick assessment of the advert. The simple cues help people involved in this category to make decisions about whether to accept or decline the quality of foods advocated by the information contained in the adverts (O'Keefe, 2006). A number of factors characterizing messages on the periphery include a Blue advert’s physical appeal, glib speaking style, or pleasant association between the message and music playing in the background. Thus, people making decisions using the periphery route rely on simple decision-making rules. As an advantage of the peripheral route, it is easy for the pet owners to engage in a superficial form of thinking, which takes less effort, prompting people to do it easily (O'Keefe, 2006). Regardless of the route taken by Blue’s audience, research argues, two variables determine the processing of the information. These variables include the audience’s ability to process and their motivation in processing. The nature of the message presented to Blue’s audience mainly should focus on either of these two routes. None is more effective than the other is, so long as the message persuades the audience. This is the case with the Blue TV commercials. The message, containing high creativity and uniqueness falls to different kinds of people. Whatever method they choose in decoding is what suits them best. However, the success of the advert is if it effectively persuades pet owners to purchase their commodities. "Blue" Advertising Campaign aims at convincing pet owners to try their brand of food. The campaign, taking a number of forms, from different customer accounts to the use of actors, hopes to convince more people to use the brands. The campaign hopes to capture the attention of the people by communicating the qualities of their foods, and the ingredients that they contain. While some of the foods contain grains and wheat, the brand brags that its products are whole meat and supplements. It offers a variety of products to pet owners, including whole meat and canned foods among others. Many of the episodes shoot and used in the campaign are of past users of the food, people who asserts that they have fed their cats and dogs on Blue and have no regrets. This convinces other pet owners to try the food too. Generally, as established in this essay, Blue campaign persuades pet owners to try their brand of products. References Armstrong, S. (2010). Persuasive Advertising: Evidence-based Principles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Blue.com. (2013). Why BLUE? Because only BLUE is made with the unique combination of high-quality, natural ingredients plus exclusive LifeSource Bits. Retrieved from http://bluebuffalo.com/best-dog-food Boush, D. M., Friestad, M., & Wright, P. (2009). Deception in the marketplace: The psychology of deceptive persuasion and consumer self-protection. New York: Routledge. McStay, A. (2013). Creativity and advertising: Affect, events and process. O'Keefe, D. J. (2006). Persuasion: Theory & research. Thousand Oaks [u.a.: Sage. Tyagi, C. L., & Kumar, A. (2004). Advertising management. New Delhi: Atlantic. Read More