Lo2 workbook
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Understanding clients and their requirements is important in marketing to produce work they will be pleased with. Communication must be kept open during production and clients should review progress to ensure the work matches their vision. Market research techniques like market segmentation help understand a market's consumers and competition to identify opportunities. A SWOT analysis examines a company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to plan improvements. Audience profiling provides demographic and behavioral information about typical clients to tailor marketing. Press releases aim to communicate newsworthy information to media organizations and should contain the who, what, when, where, why and how of an announcement.
Lo2 workbook
- 1. Understanding the principal methods and techniques used in marketing and public relationships Marketing: Why is it important in marketing to understanding your clients and their requirements? In marketing it is incredibly important that you understand your client and their requirements in order to produce work that will please them and they will be happy with. A full understanding of what a client wants ands then making a detailed plan on how you are going to provide this is essential. Lines of communication must be kept open during work or production and it may be wise to have the client review your progress to ensure the work is what they envisioned and they are pleased with it. Another reason communication is a good idea is that clients are often quite difficult and may change their mind deciding they no longer like something once they see it in the flesh. Having them review your progress often will avoid the difficulty of having a day left until deadline and your client telling you that what has been produced is not what they want. Why is understanding the market you are working in important? What techniques and tools could be used to help someone understand their market? A company or organisation must have a detailed understanding of the market they are entering in order to be a success; there is no use in entering a market blind. By mapping out and researching a market many things can be found out such as competition and consumers. These things help you spot gaps in the market and help when deciding exactly how to pitch yourself and where best to place your company in the market. One technique used to gain a better understanding of a market is market segmentation. This is when the market is split into different sections that once looked at individually are easier to analyse. A company’s marketing team would choose one market segment to target. What is a SWOT analysis? Why are they are they a useful tool? SWOT analysis is a way of looking at your company or organisation to find its strengths and weaknesses. It stands for Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Looking at these four things allows you to point out the strengths of your company currently and the opportunities to improve it in the future, as well as the weaknesses of your company currently and the threats it could face from competition, economic climate etc. This is useful as it allows you to plan out the best way to run your company playing to strengths and improving weaknesses as well as foreseeing possible threats and opportunities of the future. What is audience profiling? What sort of information might be included in an audience profile? Audience profiling is when a company or organisation builds up knowledge about their typical clients. This involves things such like age, location, income and lifestyle choices. This information can be found out through interviews, surveys or even from secondary research that other people have done. To understand your audience further it is important to get a more specific idea of how they interact with your product or services. For example how often they purchase it, how they do this, how much they will pay, if there is a certain time that they use more. After this you must find out how clients currently perceive your products or services, for example whether they see it as a luxury or as a necessity. This will allow you to make sense of some of the other data you have found such as how often clients buy and will allow you to know how best to pitch your product or services. Select a magazine and find their audience profile: I chose Tepsic magazine. The age range of their audience is 18-34 and there is a 55% male readership. 75% of the audience buy music each month, 81% buy clothing each month, 66% go to a concert each month and 51% shop online each month.
- 2. Explain in detail the 4 different elements of the marketing mix. A Product is seen as the item that satisfies the wants and needs of the consumer. Each product has its own lifecycle with some remaining in high demand for longer than others. A marketing team must research to make an estimate at how long their product will last and from here they can make decisions to elongate their products life on the market. Price is the amount a customer pays for the product. This is obviously very important as it accounts for the amount of profit a company can make and therefore its future survival. A price need to be set that compliments the other elements of the marketing mix. Promotion concerns all the methods of communication that the marketing team use in order to provide information to different people about the product. Promotion compromises elements such as advertising, public relations, sales organisation and sales promotion. Place refers to ensuring the product is placed somewhere it is easy to access for customers. Techniques such as franchising and different methods of distribution are used for this. Select a publication, product or audience and explain the range of marketing materials that they use. The media company Vice use a huge range of media materials. They have a website that contains interactive elements, video and audio and their videos, audio files can be found all over. They also use print; they release a magazine that is free in many stockists. Provide your own definition of advertising. Advertising is the efforts a company makes in order to increase the exposure of their company and promote their products or services. This can take many forms such as print, internet, video or audio. What is the purpose of sponsorship? Support your answer with detailed examples. The purpose of sponsorship is to get the name of your product out there by using something else, usually something that fits your product/services or is something that is popular with your demographic. For example one sponsor of the 2014 FIFA world cup was Budweiser. So for an amount of money from Budweiser to help fund the competition, FIFA allowed Budweiser’s brand name to appear in stadiums, there will have been a lot of Budweiser advertisements in ad breaks. This will have got them a lot of exposure and their name will have got out to a lot of people. It makes sense, as they are a beer company and many men watch the football, these men are likely to drink beer and so will be susceptible to beer advertisements. What is the purpose of endorsements? Explain a range of different types of endorsements and use examples. Endorsements are when someone makes positive comments about a company. They will be quoted or filmed saying this and are often paid to do so. Celebrities can be used very effectively in this and are often used to endorse a product. The idea is that someone will see their favourite celebrity, for example Gareth Bale, drinking the product he is endorsing, Lucozade Sport, then they will want to do the same. Companies can also endorse “experts” and this is something that is a very popular trend in toothpaste adverts at the moment. The idea in this is if someone is an expert on something and is giving you advice you are likely to listen. With the toothpaste adverts a dentist will tell you to use the organisations product. Members of the public are used too. This is popular with products such as anti-wrinkle creams; a member of the public will be filmed after using it for a few weeks and asked to talk about the improvements they’re seeing. The idea with this is that unlike the celebrity or expert versions, using a member of the public to endorse a product can allow your clients to think, “They are just like me” and think that they will be able to get the same great results.
- 3. Why could holding an event be a good marketing strategy? What are some of the opportunities and threats of holding an event? Holding an event can generate a lot of publicity to help a company get into the public eye from the people who attend the event, word and mouth and media coverage. Giveaways and other fun events can help generate a positive view on the company and are a good way for them to give the appearance that they are “for the people” and for their customers. They must be planned in great detail to ensure they run smoothly as there is much that can go wrong defeating the purpose of the event and creating bad publicity for the company. Even with all this they sometimes still go wrong. One example of this is when the American drinks brand Snapple brought out an ice-lolly line and erected a 25ft Snapple lolly in Union Square, New York. The lolly started melting almost instantly flooding the square in a thick, sticky liquid causing the area to have to be evacuated and fire fighters called in to clear the area with their hose- pipes. Snapple were fined for this stunt-gone wrong and gained a lot of publicity, some negative, but most people just thought the fact that Snapple failed to think the lolly might melt in the sun was hilarious and in the end the stunt probably worked, if not in the way Snapple had originally hoped. What is merchandising? Use detailed examples to help explain. Merchandising has a number of meanings, in retail merchandising concerns the way products are displayed in the shop, what is used to decorate the display, how the products are set up etc. The display will be put together with the target audience in mind so it is them that notice and are drawn to it. Another meaning for merchandising is when one brand is used to sell other items. For example when a film or TV shows comes out there is always T-shirts, replica figures of the characters, toys etc. created that people who are fans of the show or film will be interested in purchasing. Public Relations: What is the purpose of a press release? What sort of things should a good press release contain? The purpose of a press release is to try and ensure that a person or companies PR team can communicate something newsworthy to news media corporations. They will be sent to print, radio and television organisations providing information about the business and the thing that you want to be reported. The idea is that the information you will send will provide all of the information necessary to write a story from. What is the purpose of an electronic media pack? What sort of things should a good electronic media pack contain? A media pack is a compilation of information about your company including things like a press release, biography of the business, articles written about it, testimonials and information like demographic and sales figures. This will be sent to people who could be useful to your company such as possible advertisers or businesses that could form future partnerships. For example a magazine will send out or provide a media pack for Advertisers to look at and decide whether the magazines readership fits their target audience and if paying to advertise in it is worth their money. What is the purpose of a PR briefing? Why should you create one? Explain some of the areas a brief should cover. A PR briefing lays out the goals, main audience, planned effect and budget of the PR campaign. The purpose of it is to ensure everyone knows what the goal is and what they are required to do in order to meet these goals while keeping to the plan and remaining in budget etc.
- 4. What is the purpose of a press conference? Why might you hold one? Use specific examples to help you with your response. Press conferences are held to allow a company or individual to release a statement to the press and then be asked questions. The idea is that it allows you to have more control over what the press is getting in terms of information, the hope is that by releasing a thought out statement will help limit any damage of the incident being commented on or if it is a positive thing, help increase this positive publicity. This does not always go to plan however and there are many examples of a statement being delivered and then the person who delivered it falling apart at the barrage of questions fired at them causing a huge amount of negative publicity. Why could hand-outs be useful when managing a PR event? Hand-outs can be very useful for a PR team as a way to get forward ideas that you want to promote in a package that people can take away. This information can be offered with a media pack or press release and can be given away at press conferences, interviews, events etc. They are often given away with something like a pen or bag that displays the company logo on it. Everyone like freebies and so these are a good way to make yourself as a company seem giving as well as having people walking around advertising your company on whatever it is you have given them. What are some of the advantages of holding an interview instead of a press conference? In an interview you have more control, they are usually not live and you can demand to see the questions before you get to the interview and tell the interviewer what questions you will and wont answer. This way you can avoid being asked about difficult things and concentrate on promoting your company positively. Sometimes however, even interviews go wrong, whether the interviewer ignores the question agreement or the interviewee for whatever reason doesn’t handle the situation well they sometimes end in an argument or even a fight causing a huge headache for the PR team. Why do people set up film and picture opportunities? Use examples to help our response. Film and picture opportunities are a great way to allow people to see what nice things you as an individual or company are doing for the community or your customers etc. Many companies sponsor sports teams or community centres and provide kit and equipment for them, this is a nice admirable gesture and the companies know this, which is why they almost always get a member of their staff photographed or videoed presenting some kit to the team for this photo to be used as a PR tool. The aim of this is that people will see the photo and like the company, therefore being more likely to choose them over any competition. Why are contacts and networking important in marketing and PR? What kinds of contacts could be useful? Provide details of a PR contact from at least one organisation. If a company is gearing up to release something new, for example a clothing line about to release a new collaboration with a celebrity, it would help promotion greatly if interviews could be set up and televised, if advertisements could go up etc. For this to happen a talk show must be contacted or an billboard company must be approached, these large organisations would not just talk to anyone and so having internal contacts is incredibly useful if not essential. Rather than having to go from the bottom and wait a long time until you get the chance to appear on the talk show, at which time it will probably be too late, a good PR manager will be able to make one call and sort it out. Networking and gaining contacts effectively does this. If you were wishing to feature somewhere on Vice you must email one of the addresses provided on their website. The page details that you should wait 90 days until it is safe to assume that they are not interested, this means you could wait 89 days until your story is accepted. This is far too long for any promotion campaign and more evidence of the benefits of contacts and networking.