Marketing Communication Exam Questions - Assignment Example

Marketing Communication Exam Questions Question The brand personality framework refers to the system of identifying brands through associating them with human characteristics (Aaker, 1997:348). Brand personality framework provides the means of measuring the personality of a brand under five humanistic characteristics. First, sincerity is a characteristic that assess the genuineness, honesty and cheerfulness with which a brand/service is offered, where excitement measures the daring and spiritedness of the brand owner and competence measures the reliability and efficiency of a brand (Aaker, 1997:349). Sophistication is a brand personality characteristic that displays the glamour of the consumer, while ruggedness measures the strength of the brand (Aaker, 1997:351). The brand personality allows consumers to identify emotionally with a product, while making the consumers respond to the brand with feelings and emotions. The brand personality framework provides for a different perspective of looking at a brand, through using a system of human characteristic to assess the product, such that the consumer is able to fully understand how they feel about a product, as opposed to the consumer looking at how the brand performs. In this respect, brand personality enables a consumer to express himself or herself through the brand (Aaker, 1997:3454). For example, any individual who chooses to wear a Nike truck suit and Nike branded racing shoes simply wants to express himself or herself as an athlete, and any individual who looks at such a person will simply see an athlete. The marketing communication managers can utilize the brand personality framework to connect with the target audience or the prospective customer by differentiating the brand that the managers are promoting from a range of brand categories, which will in turn act as a driver of consumer preference and usage (Aaker, 1997:350). Therefore, the marketing communication manager can use a brand that will relate to a consumers personality as the promotion bait, making the consumers go for the product, since by relating such a product with their personality, the brand will serve as a means of the consumer expressing themselves. For example, the marketing manager can target the Nike brand to customers who look beauty and physical-figure conscious, since probably they are used to jogging or working in the gym, thus the Nike brand would help identify the customers as athletes. Question 2 The hierarchy of marcom effects model is relevant in moving a consumer from awareness to a loyal customer. This is because; it defines the six necessary steps in the order of their hierarchy, while providing the advertisers and brand owners with the necessary ingredients to apply at each step to be able to capture the attention of the prospective customers and keep their attention focused on the product, until they purchase the it (Ringland & Young, 2006:22). The hierarchy of marcom effects model is a model that helps to define the process of moving a consumer from a disinterested and detached audience to an active brand purchaser, through anticipating and overcoming psychological barriers for the prospective customers, through advertisements (Ringland & Young, 2006:27). The model entails six steps, with the first one being the creation of awareness by the advertisement, so the audience can know the existence of the product. This is followed by creation of knowledge by availing all the necessary details about the product, to ensure the audience is aware about its purpose and performance (Ringland & Young, 2006:21). This step is followed by making the audience like the product, most specially through using attractive features that will entice the audience. Preference is the next stage, which seeks to make the customer disregard the other products and focus on one brand alone. Here, differentiating features becomes essential to help differentiate the products (Ringland & Young, 2006:36). Conviction follows, where the advertisers persuade the customer to purchase the product, through free samples for testing, which is then followed by the purchase step, where the actual product is bought. The purchase step should be very easy, so the customer will not be discouraged. For example, Barclays Bank advertises as the official English Premier League sponsor, but then goes ahead to advertise to the football audience the simple and quick banking process with the bank. This way, it captures the interest of the audience through football, but informs the audience of its existence, its services, how quick and simple they are, and persuades the football fan to purchase its products and services. This creates interest in the football fans, who might then become its customers. Question 3 Psychographics as a segmentation approach entails the study and use of the behaviors, interest and attitudes of the customers to establish a market niche. Through the psychographics segmentation approach, a brand owner targets a certain group that demonstrates certain interests, activities or behaviors, and then focuses on selling the brand to such groups (Smith, 2013:72). Through the psychographics segmentation approach, the brand owners can apply factors such as location, resource base or common interest to sell a certain brand to the target group, which is obviously known to share such interests. The application of personality, lifestyles and social classes is the most fundamental basis of psychographics as a segmentation approach, which then divides the society into different segments, and then seeks to target only one group, while completely ignoring the interest of the other groups in the brand (Smith, 2013:75). For example, it is common globally to find billboards for different products in the major urban areas, while such billboards will never be found in the very remote locations of the countries. The bill boards are mainly placed at strategic places in the urban areas, such as on the gateway to the city or town, but they are completely missing in the rural areas, although there could also be consumers of such products in the rural areas. This presents a form of psychographics segmentation approach, where the brand owners segment the society into the urban and the rural classes, and specifically targets the urban classes, while neglecting to advertise to the rural classes through bill boards, but may be reaching them through the mass media such as Television and Radio. This strategy is applied because; while the billboard will be viewed by many people in the urban areas which are densely populated, they will only be viewed by few people in a certain rural location, which is often sparsely populated. Question 4 There are a range of sales promotions often offered in a typical supermarket. Price deals form a major promotion strategy that is applied in the supermarket, which may pitch either single unit or multiple unit promotion (Eisend, 2013:42). For example, the single unit promotion could entail the promotion of a candy at $1.25, while the multiple unit promotion of the same brand of candy could be labeled 4 at $5. While in both the single or the multiple unit price deals the customer will pay equal amounts for the candy at $1.25, the managerial effect of the single unit promotion is that only few of such products might be bought since the customer can pick just a single item, while the multiple unit promotion encourages the sale of volumes, since each pick will entail several items (Eisend, 2013:47). However, the customer effect of the multiple unit promotion is that; it could be de-motivating to the customers, who may only want a single product, but find such products promoted in a batch of several items. Thus, this promotional strategy may lower the sales by hindering the purchase of even a single product, when the products are batched together in bundles. The positive or negative framing of the message advertising a product is yet another promotional method applied in supermarkets. For example, a multivitamin product may either be promoted as; ‘suitable for re-energizing’, when placed under the teenage products section, while it can be framed ‘suitable for protecting your health’, when placed under the elderly products section of the supermarket. The effect of this promotional strategy to the customer is to make them buy the product based on their interest in the product (Cummins & Roddy 2002:13). On the other hand, the managerial effect of such advertising is to create product differentiation based on demographic characteristics of the society. References Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of Brand personality. Journal of marketing research 34(3), 347-356. Cummins, J. & Roddy M. (2002). Sales Promotion: How to Create, Implement and Integrate Campaigns That Really Work. Kogan Page. Eisend, M. (2013). The moderating influence of involvement on two-sided advertising effects. Psychology and Marketing, 30, 566-575. Ringland, G., & Young, L. (2006). Scenarios in marketing: From vision to decision. Chichester, England: Wiley. Smith, J. (2013). Psychographic Targeting and Message Customization in Online Advertising. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Read More