Week Thriteen

This past week has been filled with an immense amount of work as well as learning in order to further our study of marketing as well as our Smart Projects. Tuesday's class focused on the former while Thursday's focused on the latter.

Logically, I will begin with Tuesday. We began this class by furthering our discussion of the communication process. This process involves how a sender creates and sends a message as well as how the receiver brings in and decodes the message. The communication process is shown below.

To me, the most important part of the communication process is noise. This is anything on the outside that gets in the way of a person's ability to decode the message. This could be anything from other advertisements to news articles to other store displays. The idea of noise interested me so I decided to look into it more in depth. I discovered that there are really four different kinds of noise, physical, physiological, psychological, and semantic. The first two types of noise occur more often when the communication process is verbal. A physical noise might be loud music interrupting a conversation while physiological noise might be a speech impediment of one of the parties. However, since we were focusing on advertisements, I chose to focus more on the last two types of noise. 

The first is psychological. An example of a psychological noise is a preconceived idea. This is something the consumer believes he or she already knows to be true. For example, last week we looked at the Burger King ad. Someone who believes McDonald's chicken sandwich is better is a psychological noise to the Burger King ad because they are less willing to hear the perspective that Burger King's could be just as good. Finally, semantic noise occurs when the two parties have different meaning systems. This occurred in class when we were looking at the British advertisements. Before we were told what the advertisements were for (a type of cigarette), we did not understand the meaning of the ad. This is because people in Britain have a different meaning or understanding of the humor used to create the ad. An example of one of the British ads is pictured to the right. This is a visual play on words (It's not over until the fat lady sings).

We also discussed the Old Spice TV ad shown below.

This commercial helped us to understand some advertising techniques. The first one is incongruity. By having the man in the commercial be in three distinct places (the bathroom, on a boat, and the beach/on a horse) Old Spice used incongruity. In other words, they associated things that don't usually belong together in order to make them more memorable. Additionally, the used the idea of primacy/recency. Primacy is the idea that a person will remember the first thing they see best. This may be why Old Spice chose to use an attractive man at the very beginning of their ad. The idea of recency is that someone remembers best what they saw most recently. This is why Old Spice puts the man on the horse at the end. If most people are like me, when they are thinking or talking about the commercial, or looking it up, they will think or talk about and search the man on the horse commercial rather than the Old Spice body wash commercial. 

Further along in the class we talked about marketing communications. The purpose of marketing communications is to inform, persuade, and connect. This is done through a promotional mix. A promotional mix focuses on creating "buzz." This is done through merchandising, campaigning, direct mail, advertising, public relations, sales, personal selling, and publicity. Sometimes, the differences between these things are hard to discern. The main definitions/differences we discussed in class are listed below, while the image to the left displays the idea of promotional mix.

• advertising-mass communication, always positive
• personal selling-to one person
• public relations-within the firm, manage publicity
• publicity-TV coverage, etc, out of firm's control, can be negative

We also discussed different types of media. The image below represents the three different types of media. Where owned meets paid can be considered enhanced engagement, paid and earned promotional interaction, and owned and earned organic interaction. Finally, there can be a fourth type of media called shared media. This is the word of mouth or buzz media that a company receives. All of these types of media are also part of the promotional mix.

Finally, we talked about the AIDA model. This is a model that helps companies reach their goals. It stands for awareness, interest, desire, and action. In order to be successful, an organization must create all four of these things, awareness of the product, interest in it, a desire to buy or invest in it, and the action of actually buying or investing. Examples of how each is created is listed below.

• awareness-articles, ads, podcasts
• interest-web content, newsletters, social media, email
• desire-white papers, e-books, brochures
• action-case studies, testimonial, data sheets, e-learning

Thursday's class was devoted to our Smart Projects. As the deadlines to finish our project approaches, more work needs to be done in order to be successful. However, my group has worked well together over the semester, and we are taking the final push to the end in stride. Thursday's class greatly benefited our group. Our original poster design was not very eye catching, and in general pretty boring. However, in my opinion, through our discussion with both Professor Spotts and Dr. Gettens, we were able to improve our poster drastically. The final product took a great deal of tweaking and attention to detail in order to finish, but we are proud of the way it turned out in the end. Our poster is pictured below. 

On Thursday we also discussed the elevator pitch. This is a 60-90 second discussion of our product in order to get a potential investor interested in it. We watched an example of a student doing a pitch, and were encouraged to start thinking about our own. The elevator pitch can be broken down as follows:

1. 10-15 seconds to define who you are
2. 45-60 seconds to describe what you do
3. 10-15 seconds to state what you want from this person

The purpose of an elevator pitch is to engage the person you are speaking to in order to fascinate them by your product in a short period of time. Some tips for a good elevator pitch include not speaking too fast, containing your enthusiasm, and not using notes. Along with our value proposition, the elevator pitch is something each member of our group should be able to deliver flawlessly.

During this class and the last few days, we have also been working on our brand strategy memo. As our engineers are finishing up creating the final product, we are focused on creating a strong brand for our product. As we only have eleven days until the expo, our group is finally seeing or project come together, and we are excited to be able to share it with our peers and members of the WNE community.

Until next week!

-Kristen