Does Advertising Affluence ADIDAS - Research Proposal Example

Research Proposal: Advertising in ADIDAS and Section # of This research proposal aims at analyzing the influence of advertising activities for the world renowned brand – ADIDAS. Title of the Research Aimed towards analyzing the influence of advertising, following is the title of the research project: Does advertising affluence ADIDAS? Literature Review According to Barry (2008), traditionally, advertising has always been assumed as a cost to the organization. With the changes and restructuring of business and operations in the last decade or so, marketing, and most importantly advertising have gained importance as selling has taken a major seat in driving the operations of a business. Today, too, in accordance with Felton (2006), some individuals consider advertising as an excess budget but its posterior impact brings about the changes to the mindset of these individuals. Advertising is a trigger that instigates action from the viewer, attracting them into buying products and services from the manufacturer. The gurus of marketing, such as Moriarty (2008) and Ogilvy (2004), state that the ultimate aim of advertising is not just to trigger an impact but to create and spread awareness amongst the masses about the existence of a product and/or service, its features and benefits, availability and other factors that constitute the product mix. In accordance with Lucas (2006), advertising has gained momentum in recent times with firms spending millions and billions towards advertising at various levels. Amongst the hot topics today, as stated by Pricken (2008), a recent debate that has come across is the importance of advertising in well established and renowned brands. For the fact that one of the major aims of advertising is to create and spread awareness amongst the target audience; along the similar lines, it is being argued that since the big brands have readily made their existence known to the masses, and these brands are the forerunners when the target audience goes to shop around for the relevant products and/or services, such brands should cut down on their advertising budget, which can drastically cut down their costs, ultimately influencing the consumer product price, as suggested by Vonk (2005). Big brands such as ADIDAS, NIKE, REBOK, or others, tend to spend millions of dollars every year on various forms of advertising through different media and advertising campaigns. According to Calkins (2005), brands consider advertising as a major barrier to entry for the upcoming entrants. Researches from Dhar (2007), Keller (2007) and Guinn (2008) reveal that for the last several years, the brands existing today have been the sole renowned brands, and not many brands emerging up in the markets today, which goes to show the monopoly kind of a situation that these brands have created added to the ‘high-rise’ barriers to entry that are difficult to break – advertising being the most powerful and deadliest of these weapons. In accordance with Tungate (2007), advertising has moved beyond a single media advertisement to the place where it takes in a number of variants of the same. Celebrity endorsement is a relatively new formation of advertisement today; in this phenomenon, a brand ‘buys-out’ a celebrity or a renowned figure and attracts their admirers into purchasing the products and services. The celebrity is known as a brand ambassador, and generally illustrates himself/herself being a user of the said product. Brands tend to spend a huge sum on celebrity endorsed advertisement, and big names such as ADIDAS, NIKE, etc. hire big-time celebrities from NBA, etc. to ensure that their brand sells across the globe. During advertising of sports brands, such as ADIDAS in this case, as stated by Wells (2005), brands tend to develop a forth running tag line that runs with their brand name everywhere; the appeal and creativity of this tag line is very critical in advertising campaigns. The ADIDAS tag line states: Impossible is nothing… Accordingly, Guinn (2008), states that this tag line within itself is a sign of motivation and commitment to hard-work, rather a pull towards hard-work, binding individuals towards the scenario where they start believing that if they work hard, then the term impossible does not exist. This is known as the hidden message of the brand. Advertising is meant to be a tool that must deliver this hidden message along with the brand values and brand characteristics; these are critical to be portrayed by means of advertising. Advertising creates a brand image for the business in the minds of the consumers, and it is critical for the business to ensure that this brand image is in line with what the business wants the customer to think about them. Considering the criticality associated with the conveying of this message and the fact that consumer psyche changes with the passage of time, it becomes critical for a brand to ensure that the message is conveyed through the right means and modes – thus the importance of advertising never dies in its truest of sense. Research Question & Objectives The objective of this research is to determine whether or not the big brands, such as ADIDAS in this case, should reduce excessive advertising, determining its influence and judging the impact advertising creates, and the negative influence that the absence of advertising will create towards the consumers of the products. Following is the research question underlying this research proposal: Does advertising still bring revenue for ADIDAS? As per the fundamentals of statistics, the null hypothesis tends to negate the assumption that is to be analyzed by means of the research. Subsequently, the null hypothesis is stated as below: Advertising no longer attracts customers to ADIDAS. Methodology According to Bryman (2007), researches reveal that the most optimal strategy for conducting a research is to involve secondary research as well as primary research. Secondary research would constitute the review of existing literature about the given topic, taking references from text books, journals, and other reliable text sources; recent literature would be given prime importance in this regard. Case studies will also be taken into consideration in this regard. Primary research, mainly divides into qualitative and quantitative fields; since this research requires hypothesis testing, there would be a questionnaire developed (attached in the appendix), while within this questionnaire; there would be both quantitative and qualitative research questions for the respondents. The respondents would be selected by means of simple random sampling, and the sample size would be 50. The location to catch the respondents would be randomly selected malls where ADIDAS and its competitive brands are present. In accordance with Cooper (2006), the quantitative research would imply the presence of close ended questions in the questionnaire, with confined set of answers that would lead to ease of calculation of values. As the respondents respond within the given set of answers, their answers would be utilized for analytics through statistical methods of research assessment. According to Cooper (2000), the qualitative research supports and supplements the findings of the quantitative researches, allowing, at the same time, the respondents to give their opinion and feedbacks regarding the subject under consideration. Since the sample size is greater than 30, once the responses are taken, z-tests shall be used for analyzing the values and testing hypothesis. The confidence interval undertaken shall be 5% i.e. the researcher shall be able to comprehend the outcome with 95% probability of the value being a true value. Timescale This project/research shall be time consuming since it involves questionnaires along with statistical analyses. Following are the activities that are to be managed within the scope of this project, stated along with the probable time taken for the same: Gathering the existing literature, compilation, and sorting: this activity would take approximately one week since comprehensive literature is available on advertising. Analysis of the literature: this activity would take approximately five days since there is need to be sorting of the literature before applying analytics to avoid any extra work. Development of questionnaires: questionnaires need to be developed considering the fact that respondents would be random shoppers or general public and therefore will not have much time to fill lengthy jobs. This would take approximately three days. Refining and fine tuning of questionnaires: refining the questionnaires would be a long process that would take approximately a week as it would require peer reviews and reviews from instructors, etc. Primary research: this is a long phase taking approximately two to three weeks because gathering or approaching 50 individual respondents will be a not-so-easy task. Additionally, it would be a better idea to conduct research in phases such as varying timing in different days. Tabulation and compilation of data: tabulation and compilation would take three to five days since data needs to be tabulated appropriately as a single entry going wrong way would lead to the acceptance/rejection of a false/true hypothesis. Statistical analysis of data: once tabulation is done, statistical analyses would take approximately two days to conduct statistical analyses; most likely, SPSS or MiniTab shall be used for this purpose. Final compilation and report writing: report writing and compilation would roughly take a week. Proof reading and corrections in the report: this would take approximately three to four days. Ethical Considerations & Limitation of the Research Cooper (2000) analyzes that there is no research that is free from ethical considerations and limitations. However, those researches involving interviews and questionnaires have ethical considerations on the higher side because on a general note respondents prefer being anonymous and subsequently, the researcher has to be cautious about that on ethical grounds. Though hiding identity of the respondents leads to reduced authenticity of the research. To solve this dilemma, brief demographics of the respondents shall be asked for in the questionnaire as well as, would be, mentioned during the analyses of the primary research but following the consideration of ethics, the names and other variables would not be disclosed that may lead to identifying the individuals. The limitations of this research are scarcity of resources such as time, cost, and researchers. Ideally, if there was abundance of time and cost, and individuals working on this project, focus groups or group discussions could have been called on that would have given a tremendous insight on this topic, since it is very interesting in itself. And even if the current research strategy was undertaken, it would have been possible to increase the size of sample and approach during random timings of various days, and some peak timings as well, to ensure that the customer base met at these outlets can give us a good feedback and response for our research. References Bryman, A. and Bell, E. (2007), ‘Business Research Methods’, Oxford University Press Cooper D, and Schindler P. (2006) ‘Business Research Methods’, McGraw-Hill Irwin Cooper, D. and Schindler P. (2000), Business Research Methods. McGraw-Hill College David Ogilvy (2004) Confessions of an Advertising Man. Southbank Publishing Gavin Lucas, Michael Dorrian (2006) Guerrilla Advertising: Unconventional Brand Communication. Laurence King Publishers George Felton (2006) Advertising: Concept and Copy, Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company John Caples, Fred E. Hahn (1998) Tested Advertising Methods (Prentice Hall Business Classics). Prentice Hall Kevin Lane Keller (2007) Strategic Brand Management. 3rd Edition. Prentice Hall Mainak Dhar (2007) Brand Management 101: 101 Lessons from Real-World Marketing. Wiley Mario Pricken (2008) Creative Advertising. Thames & Hudson Mark Tungate (2007) Adland: A Global History of Advertising. Kogan Page Nancy Vonk, Janet Kestin (2005) Pick Me : Breaking Into Advertising and Staying There. Wiley Pete Barry (2008) The Advertising Concept Book. Thames & Hudson Sandra Moriarty, Nancy D Mitchell, William D. Wells (2008) Advertising. 8th Edition. Prentice Hall Thomas OGuinn, Chris Allen, Richard J. Semenik (2008) Advertising and Integrated Brand Promotion. South-Western College Pub Tim Calkins, Philio Kotler (2005) Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management. Wiley William D. Wells, Sandra Moriarty, John Burnett (2005) Advertising: Principles and Practice. 7th Edition. Prentice Hall Read More