This is a blog which will be assesed as a part of my coursework for my Degree and focuses on Understading the customer and the Theories and Stereotyping that come with this.
Now we all know advertising is about reaching as many people within your target audience as possible. To achieve this however you need to understand how they respond to advertisements and better still understand how Men and Women as different groups respond to advertisements. This weeks lesson was about gender differences in response to direct mail and with this was also used to tie in our Integrated Charities Assignment; we could then use the information from this lesson when thinking about what charity would would most appeal to our target audience, students aged 18-24.
To start off Ruth showed us the advertisements below and we all had to say what we felt about the advert.
- As a class we came to the result that although the use of Sean Bean's voice was very clever, as it is a very distinctive and recognisable voice, the actual advert itself lacked impact and many of us got bored quickly.
- This advert became very disturbing for a couple of members within our group as they have lost family members to cancer. However the general feel of the class was too heavy and is too focused on getting people emotionally but for me that it is exactly what is needed... even if it is so impact full it is what is needed to get people's attention.
- The final advert was one for giving blood which has a personal link to me because I have been giving blood ever since I have been able too. The group found that this advert was probably the most influential because it gave you straight facts and the slogan "save a life... Give Blood" is simple and sticks in your mind. ____________________________________________________________________________________
Moving on from our own views within the class room I want to look at some of the theory that is out there. One of the strongest theories is from Schiebe and Condry (1984) who examined advertisements according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted in advertisements. The found that:
- That advertisements aimed at women portrayed beauty and youth.
Where as,
- Advertisements aimed at men showed physical strength and ambition.
I now have 2 different adverts for deodorant, just see if you can see the differences Schiebe and Condry found.
Well welcome again to my blog and as the title suggests this weeks blog is about Enterprise Week. Enterprise Week is a series of talks and competitions that run from today, the 17th November to 22nd and I have just taken some time to talk about the 3 lectures that were aimed specifically for the Business, Marketing and Advertising students and Bucks. I am aiming to give you a brief of what they were like and then my final added thoughts. Enjoy.
Lecture One: What Next? Experts from the world of advertising and marketing come together to discuss the challenges for the industry in the next decade. (11:30am - 12:45pm @ the CLT - Chalfont Campus)
This lecture was structured very similarly to Question Time, which you may have seen on the BBC, where you have a panel of speakers from the relevant industry or sector who come together and answer a series, in this case 7, of questions in this particular industry. Now here is the panel for the lecture: ______________________________________________________________________________________
Ivor Peters - Managing Director of Primal PR under the BWP Group.
Jamie Matthews - Managing Director of Initials Marketing (Up for agency of the year).
Rob Laurence - Marketing and new Product Development Director at TGI. _______________________________________________________________________________________
Now the lecture started with 2 of our 3rd year students, Luke Burr and Rob Millett, talking about the topic for their dissertations shortly followed by Don Cowley introducing the panel and kicking off the discussion.
One of the questions which I thought was very relevant to us, as current students, was the very first question asked by Rob Millett. He asked:
How do you think the recession will affect the PR and Advertising industries and how will they counteract it, for their clients and their own businesses?
Now the reason I think this question is relevant because although I am a first year student and if I am lucky I will come out with my Degree at the tail end of the recession. Currently however, where we are very much at the beginning of a recession, the answers given by the panel came off as a sence of reassurance by basically stating that as long as the agencies and business are run properly they will stand strong through the recession. Allan Rich put some points across like the big agencies will now only pay attention to what they do best, the budget wont change but the strategies will and just that they will stick will the big brands.
In todays lecture we talked about our upcomming perception experiment assignment. We had an example test produced by Ruth to show us how to evaluate our experiment. The test was in 3 sections which all consisted of a series of pictures on a PowerPoint presentation.
The first section was a selection of 14 different print advertisments and we were shown each one for about 3-5 seconds. After all the pictures had been shown to us Ruth asked which one of the 14 print ads was most prominent in our minds by naming each one n we had a show of hands. The one most recognised generally by the class was the Nissan advert. We decided that this was mainly due to the fact that there was a large section of block colour to draw the eye in and then there were only two lines of writing which was easy to read.
The second section was this time a collection of 10 male focused advertisements, all print ads again. Again, in a group, we were asked which advert was most prominent. This time however we discussed how the advert is focused at the male population. we come to some conclusions that males prefer darker colours in their adverts like blacks, greys, browns and blues etc and that they generally remember adverts that are funny. However out of the 10 ads 90% of the females in the class remembered the Paco-Rebarno advert simply because it was a picture of a toned and semi-clothed man. Most of the males in the class though remembered an advert with a joke in it.
Then the final section was again 10 print advertisements but to contrast the second section they were all female focused. The first ad was of a man frozen outside in the snow holding a beer to keep it cold whereas there are a pair of female legs in the sauna. Now we found out that the men found out that the advert was for beer first because of the logo in the corner but in contrast the woman had noticed that there was a man outside whereas the males in the group missed that.
The aim of this lesson was to prove that men and woman are targeted differently with print and video ads aimed specifically at one sex. I also found this interesting post which is a good read:
First off I will be completely honest with you. I wasn't able to attend this weeks lecture, but and it's a good but, i read all of the lecture notes and got some notes off my friend so hopefully this weeks post should make some sense :)
This weeks lecture was all about peoples personalities and self-concepts and how marketers and advertising agencies prey on this to get you and me to buy into a particular product or brand.
The definition of personality according to the Oxford online dictionary is:
The characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s character.
Now from a marketing/advertising perspective this doesn't really sound relevant to use as a basis for an ad campaign or marketing scheme. If you compare this to the definition of Self-Concept:
The mental image or perception that one has of oneself.
You should be able to see that from a marketing point of view self-concept is easier to manipulate than personality. Someone's self-concept can be changed simply by making them think or feel as if they NEED a particular product to be the person they see themselves to be and in most cases want to be. This point is made more apparent when Solomon et al (2001) suggests that People see themselves as they imagine other people see them. So this means that you have 2 very different views but essentially they are both valuable to a marketer. I would however just like to take a minute to break the whole 'self-concept' concept down as it comes in 3 parts:
Self Image - This is the kind of person we think we are.
Ideal Self - This is the kind of person we would like to be.
Self Esteem - This is whether you actually like yourself and is determined by looking and seeing if your Self Image matches that of your Ideal Self.
It is very common though for the consumer's Self Image to be very far away from there ideal self and with the fact that "72% of men and 85% of women are unhappy with at least one aspect of their appearance" (Goleman, D. (1991).).
Its because of this high percentage of unhappy people that marketers prey on. At the end of the day if a woman is unhappy with the way she looks you can sell her make-up which you tell her will make her look 18 again, when we all really know it wont but consumers buy into it anyway... anything that you can sell to a consumer on the basis that it will help them towards their ideal self will fly off the shelves. Yes you can argue it is immoral but at the end of the day business is ruthless and it is just business. Now I will cover this in more detail in later posts but this ties in very nicely with Mazlow's Hierarchy of Need because the top 2 parts of the triangle are esteem and self-actualisation; so after all the other need for humans is fulfilled then we actually begin to look inwards at our selves and begin to asses whether we are actually what we aim and want to be.
Please have a look - http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=2&did=1464131531&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1238594670&clientId=25802
Certain advertisements can be used by Marketers and Advertisers to trigger what is know as 'Social-Comparison' by which the consumer, triggered by the ad, begins to compare themselves to that of the people in the advert. This as you can see gives Marketers and Advertisers a controlling factor over any of their consumers who can potentially be trigger by the advert. [Journal] Moving on from just the concept of Social-Comparison we also have the consumption factor... 'You are what you consume' Solomon et al (2006). This is the next step up from when I was mentioning Self-Concept earlier and suggests that "A consumers exhibits attachment to an object to the extent that it is used by that person to maintain his or her self-concept." (Douglas, B. H. & Thompson, J. C. (2004).). This is because people will make there first judgements on what a person wares, the car they drive, whether they eat a salad or a steak at dinner; all these things add up and make a pre-perception of a person before they have even spoke.
In summary the whole self-concept theory is the stronger weapon for marketers and advertisers as they can manipulate the self-concept of a consumer through social-comparison theory and coerce them into buying products that they don't really need and are probably above their budget.
Finally here is an ad that I think fit in here. :)
I would like to start talking about a persons personality by starting with a definition by Schiffman and Kanuk (2004) which states a persons personality is:
Those inner psychological characteristics that both determine and reflect how a person responds to his or her environment.
This is a good quote however I personally think that a person's personality stretches further than that; it's not just the inner makings but it must involve how people react and interact with other people and how we deal with different situations. This is covered in more detail by Hollander's research which gives 4 different sections to a person's personality. These are:
The External Aspect: how a person interacts with other people.
The Internal Aspect: a combination of their values & attitudes.
The Dynamic Aspect: faced with a new situation how do they behave e.g. social adjustments.
The Consistent Aspect: their characteristic style.
We then can use these four sections as a basis for personality traits, whether someone is outgoing or not etc. From this Cattell’s Trait Theory of Personality was born with 16 traits which you are either one or the other of. They are:
Form this starting point other people have conducted questionnaires using the traits and have come up with 4 pairs of 2 letter of which you can only be one or the other. These then make many different 4 letter codes which can tell your, in detail, what your personality type is. Each pair belongs to a specific section and they are as follows:
Pair One: Direction of your energy force
E (Extroversion) - Deals with things, people and situations.
I (Introversion) - Deals with studying ideas, information, explanations and beliefs.
Pair Two: Information Processing
S (Sensing) - You prefer to deal with facts, what you know.
N (Intuition) - You prefer ideas, looking into the unknown, looking at possibilities.
Pair Three: Making Decisions
T (Thinking) - You decide on the basis of logic, using an analytic and detached approach.
F (Feeling) - You decide using values and/or personal beliefs, letting.
Pair Four: Organizing your life
J (Judging) - You prefer your life to be planned in a stable and organised way.
P (Perceiving) - You prefer to go with the flow, to maintain flexibility and respond to events.
As a fun added activity for the lecture Ruth asked us to complete this questionnaire which uses these four pairs. The questionnaire is a more comprehensive version on the Myer Briggs test and was created by Carl Jung.
My results came out to be ENFP so straight away this means that my strongest tendencies are Extrovert, Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving however I was not convinced that 1 try would be sufficient so I waited a week and took the test again and this time I came out as a ESFP which is not surprising as I will have probably answered the questions depending on how I felt that day.
I then decided that I wanted to take another personality test that Ruth had mentioned, this one can be found here and my result was ENTJ which again is different which still just reinforces my idea that although the questionnaires are a good start they are not 100% accurate as the answers are controlled by the feeling of that person at that particular time of the test.
Although they were different each time I did see that they generally all had something in common (The fact that they all started with E) so they can give some good information. Studying consumer's personalities however helps marketers to aim brands at different people's personalities. This is where Brand Personality Framework (Aaker, J. (1997).) comes in. Brand Personality is defined as:
The attribution of human personality traits (seriousness, warmth, imagination, etc.) to a brand as a way to achieve differentiation. Usually done through long-term above-the-line advertising and appropriate packaging and graphics. (MarketingWeb.com)
Below is a list of common attributes that advertisers use in ads to target specific people:
Now the selection of these attributes is what advertisers need to decide when coming up with an advertisement. Here are some examples I have found.
Once the company has their target audience it is then up to them to differentiate their product from the competing ones and position themselves correct that customers will buy their product over others. Kotler et al (2008) defines a products position as "the way the product is defined by consumers minds relative to competing products." so you can understand that the position that a companies product holds with the market and the consumers mind can either make the product a huge success or just a product wasting space on the shelf.
Now the way the position is decided by the consumer is down to the important attributes that the products hold and the values that come with that. From that the consumer then categorises it and positions them in their minds by comparing the perceptions, impressions and feelings that they have of the product. This is all to simplify the buying process for the consumer because it's not possible to constantly re-evaluate products every time.
This might sound like the position of a product must be left up to chance; this is not the case though as companies will have strategies on how to position and differentiate themselves. For example a luxury car maker will keep with the fact that they are luxury if they know that the market is looking for it. This however can take a very long time to then just fail at the end. In summery positioning is most probably the most complex and difficult section of the STP theory but if you get it right will reap you rewards.
Once you have split your market into segments of potential consumers you will then move onto what is know as Targeting which is the second stage in the practice of STP. Defined as "The process of evaluating each market segment's attractiveness and selecting one or more segment to enter." Kotler et al. (2008) just shows the importance of this stage; as it is the actual selection of a group on consumers that should be affected the most by what the company has to offer.
Now as suggested in Kotler's definition it is the evaluation and selection of segments. This means that their must be 2 stages, the first is obviously the evaluation of each segment and this is achieved by comparing the segment to a set of criteria, which are:
Segment Size & Growth
- This will include looking at current segment sales, growth rates and expected profitability, with also the right size and growth to match the company. It is also invaluable to understand that the biggest and fastest growing segments are not always the best as the segment is too big and fast moving for the company to viably keep up.
Segment Structural Attractiveness
- This is where you need to consider the players within the segment, a company may not want to enter a segment that is over crowded or highly competitive as it could limit the profitability of the segment. The consumers influence in the segment also has to be considered because segments with high buyer power could mean that all prices are driven down creating more aggressive competition.
Company Objectives & Resources
- Touched on in the first point, even if the top 2 criteria are met the company may simply have to let that segment go because they are not big enough themselves for it to work. The company also has to think about its own long term goals and if they don't join the the segment wont be selected.
Once the segments have been evaluated the company is in a much more informed position to make its selection of the segments; now the company may only choose one segment but at the same time it's not uncommon for a company to choose multiple segments. Really though, a company should only pick segments that will offer them real value and at the same time get on over on the competitors. After the segment(s) have been selected to be targeted by the company they become what is know as a Target Market. Kotler et al. (2008) defines a Target Market as "A set of buyers sharing common needs or characteristics that the company decides to serve." which you couldn't really put any better. The target markets will contain smaller numbers than the overall market and will respond better to what the company puts out there.
Segmentation is a clever marketing tool which allows marketers to split the whole market into little groups or segments of potential customers with the same or similar interests and needs. The CIM(Chartered Institute of Marketing) defines Marketing Segmentation as:
The division of the market place into distinct subgroups or segments, each characterised by particular tastes and requiring a specific marketing mix.
One key thing to understand is that there are many ways to segment a market because as companies, you can not appeal to every consumer in the same way. There are too many of them, spread too far apart and all with different wants, needs and buying traits. Another major factor which has influenced the use of segmentation by businesses is the change in our economy... it has moved from what was know as a manufacturing economy by where companies employed 'mass marketing' strategies which worked really well. Now however the economy has moved more into a 'service economy' by where all the after sales and after care plays the larger role.
This is mainly because we, as consumers have become more savvy and as a result, more segmented. Companies have to now employ 'target marketing' where there consumer basis is researched and analysed to create focused and targeted advertisements which appeal to the targeted market. Now to find these groups or segments there are various ways to separate the market, these include:
Geographic - Segmenting the market into different geographical groups such as neighbourhoods, cities, counties, countries or nations etc. This is down to the company to decide if they want to focus in one particular area or focus on a selection of areas.
A good example of Geographic Segmentation is the various Tesco stores:
Tesco Express - Ussually located in and around large neighbourhoods and will have basics like bread, milk, fruit&veg, cheese and toilet roll plus many other basic essentials.
Tesco Metro - These stores are usually located in busy cities where there is no more room to build a a regular store and in small towns on their high streets. It will be like a mini store with most things that you would find in a regular store, even a Customer Service Desk in some cases.
Then from these you will have your regular superstore and the extra stores. You can see though how Tesco carefully select where to put each type of store by Geographic Segmentation.
Demographic - Segmenting the market on a person's or group of people's personal circumstances such as age, gender, income, family size, race, nationality, religion, family life cycle and education.
Psycographic - Segmenting the market by social-class, lifestyle or personality characteristics. The main reason for Psycographic Segmentation is because:
People in the same Demographic Segment will have different Psycographic make-ups. (Kotler et al. 2008)
Behavioural - Segmenting the market based on their knowledge, attitudes, uses or responses to a product. From this point though it can be broken down to what is known as 'Occasion Segmentation' by when people are grouped according to when they get the idea to buy, buy a product or when they actually use said product. This is whole provides a good foundation for creating market segments.
Now just take a few minutes to watch this short clip on Segmentation by Market Analysis.
These however are only a few ways to segment a market; the example picture below shows a bunch of random shapes that can all be segmented in some way whether by the actual shape, colour, what side if the page they're on etc. This basically represents the world of consumers and demonstrates how many different ways you can segment them. Have a go anyway and see how many you can come up with.
