MARKETING AND ADVERTISING The aim of this tutorial is to help you learn to identify and evaluate marketing strategies and advertisements.

Marketing in a consumer culture Marketing a product or service is an essential component of doing business in a consumer culture, like that of the United States. A business’s success depends on its ability to determine what customers want and then provide it at a reasonable cost. To achieve these goals, businesses need to plan and implement effective strategies for marketing and advertising these products and services. This involves identifying target markets and customer “hot buttons” through marketing research. 2 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Approaches to marketing research There are several approaches to marketing research, including surveys, observation, and experimentation, each of which requires proficiency in critical thinking and inductive logic.  Survey research is used to collect information and opinions about a product.  Observation involves directly monitoring consumer buying patterns.  Experimentation measures cause-effect relationships between product purchases and selected variables such as packaging, logo, or price. 3 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Marketing strategies After gathering relevant information through marketing research, the next step is to engage in strategic planning. A strategic plan is a method by which an organization deploys its resources to realize a goal or objective. In business, strategic planning generally involves the use of a strategic model, defined as “a systematic list of policies that will guide the future specification of inputs, outputs, processes, and values of the complete operations of the business of the corporation.” 4 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The SWOT model  SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The model is used for developing new marketing strategies, as well as by businesses and individuals for making major life decisions. The first two factors, strengths and weaknesses, require an internal assessment, while the last two, opportunities and threats, require external assessment.  The key in using a strategic model like SWOT is to develop strategies that concentrate on a company’s strengths and opportunities in order to overcome internal weaknesses and external threats. 5 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Advertising and the media  Advertising has three purposes:  To create product awareness  To inform customers about a product or service  To motivate customer demand and create brand loyalty  The ultimate aim of advertising is to make money, not advance truth.  Most advertising reaches us through the mass media and the Internet. 6 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Product placement  Product placement involves embedding advertisements of targeted products within television shows, films or streaming video. Often these product placements go unnoticed, especially by children.  Research shows children under the age of eight lack the cognitive maturity to recognize either the intent of advertising or the fallacious reasoning and rhetorical devices that are frequently used in ads. These problems persist through the teenage years. 7 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Evaluating advertisements  When evaluating advertisements, there are a number of questions we should ask.  Are scare tactics used to persuade us we need the product?  Does the ad provide credible evidence to support its claims?  Does the ad rely on our tendencies of peer and group conformity?  Does the ad set up a desirable image or lifestyle unrelated to the product?  Does the ad employ other informal fallacies, such as hasty generalization?  Does the ad use emotive language, images, or euphemisms?  Is the grammar confusing or the wording misleading? 8 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Evaluating advertisements (continued)  When evaluating advertisements, there are a number of questions we should ask (continued).  Is the language vague, ambiguous, or obscure?  Are the claims exaggerated?  Does the ad omit necessary information?  If the ad uses analogy, is the analogy relevant?  If the ad uses statistics, are they credible? 9 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Conclusions Advertising influences a great deal of our buying habits and beliefs, often more than we are willing to admit. Because of this, we need to be constantly vigilant in using critical thinking skills to identify and evaluate advertising messages. Recognizing our tendencies and learning about advertising strategies makes us less susceptible to manipulative advertising. 10 © 2010, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.