Writing Homework Help

CC Advertising Discussion

Provide a 300+ word response to the following question. Please separate your answers by the parts of the question.

Assignment #2 – Advertising Plan

SCENARIO: After their “recent” public issues, Chipotle is going to reinvent itself. They have decided to convert to a sit down concept restaurant that now serves alcoholic beverages (Mexican beer and margaritas). They have come to you to start off their new advertising campaign on the right note.

To develop demand for their new concept you’ll create an ad campaign following the steps outlined in the Lecture from Chapter 18. Be sure to mention each of the areas listed below. Also be sure that you are focusing on strategies for this specific ad campaign — not simply advertising their current concept. Do not use any current advertising campaign!

Step 1 — Target market of this specific ad campaign

Provide a geographic, demographic, and psychographic description of your target. I am looking for an insightful description of your target.

Step 2a — Objective of this specific ad campaign

Be sure you identify what you want this ad campaign to accomplish. Which of the types of advertising (informative, persuasive or reminder) will you be using and why?

Step 2b — Focus of campaign

What will be the focus of your ads – product-focused or institutional? Why?

Step 3 — Determine your budget

You don’t have to do anything for this step. Your client has decided to give you $1,000,000!!

Step 4a — Convey the message (be creative!)

Develop a unique selling proposition (USP) for the campaign. Make sure to provide an explanation of your rationale for the USP.

Step 4b — Determine your appeal

Will you use an informational or emotional appeal? Why?

Step 5a — Media types

Describe which media types (please be sure you understand what a media type is; please refer to this week’s lecture) you will use and why. Think about what you can and cannot afford with your budget.

Step 5b –- Media vehicles

Describe which media vehicles (again, refer to this week’s lecture to ensure you understand the definition of a media vehicle) you will use and why. For instance if magazine is the media type, then Sports Illustrated or Cosmopolitan is the media vehicle; if TV is the media type then Food Network or “Bones” is the vehicle (it can be a cable network or a network program).

Step 5c — Media schedule

How will you schedule your media? (continuous, pulsing, flighting)? Please explain why. If you select pulsing or flighting, you need to explain when.

Step 6 — IMC — Integrating your ad with the rest of the promotional tools

Identify and discuss other, non-advertising promotions you will use to coordinate with this ad campaign. Are there personal selling, sales promotions/incentives, public relations, mobile, social media, etc. efforts you’d like to include? (Keep being creative!) we are substituting IMC in this activit

Step 7 — Evaluating your campaign

This is maybe one of the most important steps. How will you evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign? How will you know if it “worked?” How will you know if you should repeat the campaign, or completely revamp it?

CHAPTER 18: Developing an Ad Campaign

In Chapter 18, the textbook does a good job of outlining the process involved in putting together an ad campaign, but there are still a few holes that can be filled in. So let’s take it from the top…

Here are the steps. Please note that they’re not quite the same as those in your chapter, but very similar. Also note that several of them are done in tandem, rather than sequentially.

Identify and analyze your target market – what are their hot buttons?
Establish your advertising objective – will you use informative, persuasive or reminder advertising (it should be based on your product life cycle) and determine the focus of your ad (product or institutional).
Determine advertising budget/appropriation
Craft your message – what will you say in your ads? This also involves your message appeal (emotional or informational?)
Evaluate and select your media – where, when and how often will you advertise?
Create your advertisement
***NOT IN THE BOOK, but important – Integrate your marketing communication
Run your ad and get some feedback – did your ad campaign work?

Let’s look at each one in a little more depth.

Step 1 — Know your target market

As always in marketing, you need to have a good grasp of exactly who your target market is. And in this case, you must define it, not just for your product in general, but for this specific ad campaign.

https://youtu.be/QH3B4WBrHgo

For example, in the ad above, which was part of an ad campaign for the Chevy HHR that ran in the 2007 Super Bowl, Chevy seemed to be targeting womenbuyers. Yet women weren’t HHR’s sole target market – Chevy is definitely targeting men, too. So women buyers were just the target market for thiscampaign. (As a side note, this ad was created by a college student who won a creative contest sponsored by GM!)

Bottom line: sometimes you’ll run an ad that targets all your customers – and sometimes you’ll target just one specific segment. You’ll, of course, include:

Geographics
Demographics
Behavior
Customer Loyalty
Psychographics, including:
- “hot buttons”
- media habits

Let’s talk about those last two bullets…

When you begin to develop promotion strategies, you’ll want to beef up the psychographics section by identifying your target markets’ “hot buttons” — i.e., their primary buying motives — and their media habits – what media they read, listen to, watch or surf. (Hint: remember the ESRI geodemographic data from Module 2? It steered you to this kind of information. This might be a good chance to use this resource again!)

Let’s look at the hot button concept first – and this is tied directly into an emotional response!!!

Example 1: What was the key reason you decided to “buy” an online, rather than an on-ground, class? What was your “hot button”? Probably schedule flexibility. Probably convenience. Probably the chance to juggle education in with all of the other commitments you already have. Probably the chance to finish a class in 8 or 12 weeks rather than 16. (Anything sound familiar?)

Example 2: Macomb Community College marketing professor emeritus Joan Hall shares this story: she was consulting with a woman who was developing an upscale “meals on wheels” — a company that delivered elegant, gourmet dinners right to your door. (Sounds good, huh?)

The would-be entrepreneur defined her target market this way:

Geographics – Grosse Pointe residents

Demographics – two segments (she was following a differentiated/multi-segment strategy, right?):

Older, upscale, widowed/single women who don’t cook for themselves anymore, and
Younger, professional, two-income, frazzled moms who are juggling home responsibilities along w/ a demanding career

Psychographics –

For the older group: invite friends over for a special evening without the hassle of cooking.
- Hot button: no need to be lonely, no need to feel sorry for yourself. Revive dinner as a social occasion.
- Media habits: local newspaper, church bulletin, would notice signs on delivery trucks in neighborhood
For the younger group: let us do the work so you can pay attention to your family. Serve nutritious, creative meals.
- Hot button: recreate dinner as the time to be together. No hassle, no guilt.
- Media habits: local newspaper, church bulletin, flyers distributed through local nursery schools, scout troops, youth sports teams

Step 2 — Specify What You Want to Accomplish

Specify your objective for the specific ad campaign — again, not just your marketing in general — and not just your overall advertising objectives. But objectives for this ad campaign. Make sure they are specific and measurable. Why? Because you want to know whether or not you accomplished them. State your objectives by including each of the following:

Your target market
The rung(s) on the hierarchy of effects (see below)
A measurable outcome, and
An end date (when you want to have accomplished your goal. If you need to accomplish it right away, you’ll do quite different advertising than if you have all the time in the world. Do you want to establish Subway as the place to “Eat Fresh” OR do you want X number of customers to come in for a $5 Footlong this Friday? Definitely a long-term branding campaign vs. immediate sales difference working here.)

Here’s an example of an ad campaign objective. What do you think… is it a good example or a not-so-good one?

“My ad campaign objective is to boost awareness of our new Diet Coke Plus cola.”

Hopefully, you said: “not-so-good” because it doesn’t follow the guidelines listed. No target market, no measurable objective, and no end date. Well, let’s fix it up to make it more usable for us. How about this:

“My ad campaign objective is to boost awareness of the new Diet Coke Plus among women 18-49 by 10 percentage points (from 25% awareness to 35%) by August 31st.”

Or how about this (this is not so hypothetical — this was the real thing):

“Our ad campaign objective is to grow adult 25-54 viewers of FOX2 News Morning by 1 rating point (from a 4 to a 5) by the end of May 2002”.

Some advertising departments use what they call the “hierarchy of effects” model (does this sound academic or what? But in spite of its name, it really is a useful tool) to help them figure out what their objective should be. They figure that consumers gradually move from knowing nothing about your product, up a “ladder” (or hierarchy) of stages until they finally buy it. You might find some similarity between this and both the consumer decision-making process in Chapter 5 AND the diffusion of innovation discussion in Chapter 12. Here are the rungs of this ladder:

Awareness – oh right, I think I’ve heard of that movie
Knowledge – isn’t that the movie with so and so in it?
Liking – that sounded pretty cool
Desire – I can’t wait to see this movie!
Purchase – just bought my ticket
Post-purchase satisfaction/loyalty – wow, great movie, I think I’ll buy the DVD.

Let’s apply it to the new Ford Bronco SUV. What stage on this “ladder” would you say this vehicle is in? Maybe “awareness” or “knowledge?” Some members of the target market would know that Ford is bringing back this classic vehicle. If we assume that the Bronco has reached the knowledge stage, Ford’s nextpromotional campaign should try to step the audience’s feelings up to the next rung: “Liking”.

**Again, whatever “rung” the target market is currently on — your ad campaign objective should be to move them up to the next rung(s).

In addition to your overall objective, remember to think about the objective of your advertising plan. You have to determine what you want this advertising campaign to accomplish. It will depend on the life cycle of the product/advertiser:

If you are early in the product life cycle (the introduction stage), you need to inform your target market of your product – informative advertising.
If you are in the growth stage of the PLC and more competition is entering the marketing, you need to use persuasive advertising – persuade your target market to select you over all the other competitors.
Finally, if you are in the maturity stage of the PLC, you’ll want to consider reminder advertising to continue to remain top of mind with your target market.

Also as part of this step, you need to choose between product and institutional advertising. Your text does a good job of explaining product advertising. If you are focusing on the features and benefits of a specific product you’d use product-focused advertising. If you are focusing on the overall offerings of the company or brand, you’d use institutional advertising. It explains what the company stands for; it’s brand image. It’s more focused on the “institution” in general rather than a specific product.

Step 3 – Budget: What Can You Spend?

In your text, there’s a brief discussion on budgeting where you’ll get some basic terms and examples. We should touch a little here on “real world” budgeting. While many larger companies use the “percentage of sales” method or others mentioned in your book, for smaller companies, it’s really about the “all you can afford” method. And what really is “all that you can afford?” That’s a question only the business owner can answer. In economic recessions, one of the first things to get cut is the marketing budget. It’s easy to zap because we already have customers, they know about us and they’ll come back – we hope!!! What’s overlooked is we need to continue the relationship with these customers; we need to create and maintain awareness of our product and then, in turn, increase demand. This is kind of hard to do without any funds with which we can communicate!

One rule to live by in marketing and advertising is that you will have to develop a budget for each year and you will want to be sure to spend every penny of it. Why? In many cases, if you don’t spend it, you could lose it for years to come.

Along these lines, a marketing director for a local business came into one of our MKTG 2020 (Advertising and Promotion Management) classes a few years back. Teams in the class developed an advertising plan for the business based on a $60,000 budget. One of the teams spent only $35,000 of the budget. After seeing the presentation, the marketing director commented that if you remember only one thing from that day, is that you need to spend all of the monies that you are given… because you will NEVER see the money that was left on the table in the marketing budget again.

Step 4 – What is Your Message?

This is also known as developing your appeal or your advertising “platform.” The platform is simply the key theme(s) that you want to address in this ad campaign. This is linked to the “hot button” back in Step 1 — and it’s linked to the creation of your ad in Step 6.

Any of you who follow politics are familiar with the term “party platform.” Such and such is the Republican platform, or such and such is the Democratic platform. The same basic concept holds true for advertising.

Here’s an example. A few years ago, Corona identified the hot button of people feeling burned out from all the hassles and interruptions of life. So their platform was something like this: “Get off the treadmill of life. Relax with Corona”. Then the advertising folks had to figure out a way to convey this theme (Corona = relaxation) so that it would grab the consumer’s attention. Again, they had to convert the platform — the idea for the ad — into an actual ad, i.e., the “message”. For these Corona ads, they decided to convey “relaxation” by using beach scenes. Anyone remember the ads?

https://youtu.be/HBVAAPro02U

In one, the central actor was shown on a beach throwing his cell phone like a skipping stone, skimming it across the water ‘til it sank (there is a certain beauty to this image, isn’t there 😉 In another, an actress was using her cell phone to prop up an uneven table leg — all while drinking Coronas, of course.

You’ll also need to determine what your appeal is going to be: informational or emotional. Another way to look at this is head vs. heart. Will you appeal to facts and logic or emotions and feelings? Your book does a nice job of explaining this.

The upshot of all of this is:

Review the “hot buttons” from Step 1.
Pick which one(s) you want to address in this ad campaign (you don’t have to address them all!) and this will be your platform
Determine your appeal: informational, emotional or a combo
Translate this platform and appeal into the actual ad message (the specific words you’ll use and the specific images that will accompany them) when you get to Step 6… One tool for translating the message is to create a unique selling proposition (USP). See your text for a thorough explanation but essentially it’s a theme or slogan that communicates the unique attributes or the product. Think of it as a brief phrase that explains the competitive advantage of your product.

But first, before you can develop your message, you need to know what media you’ll be dealing with. For example, will you be able to use sounds (like the roar of the surf) to create your beach scene? And will you be able to use images (kind of tough on radio!)? If so, will these images be stationary (as in a magazine ad)? Or can they be action-packed (as on a web site or TV, or a cell phone screen)? These decisions (oh, and don’t forget what your budget will allow!) come in the next step!

Step 5 – Evaluate and Select Your Media

Radio? TV? Pop-ups? Banners? E-mails? Church bulletins? Lawn signs? Computer games? Comic books? Bathroom stall graffiti? Talking gas pumps? Facebook? Blogs? Where should you put your message? The answer to this requires a two-fold question:

What are your customers’ media habits?
What can you afford?

Your textbook does a good job discussing this topic. You’ll want to check that out carefully – but also consider some non-traditional media — perhaps: business cards, flyers, t-shirts, car wraps, ads on cafeteria tray liners, miniature press-on “billboards” on grocery store floors…

When considering your media plan, you’ll want to think first what media types will best reach your target market. Media types include:

Television
Radio
Magazines
Newspapers
Internet
Outdoors
Direct Mail

Think about whether or not your target market uses these types of media.

Next consider the specific media vehicles within these media types. A media vehicle is a specific tool for reaching your target market. For instance if you decide to use TV will you use SportsCenter on ESPN, Chopped on Food Network, or Grey’s Anatomy on ABC? If you use magazines, will you use Cosmopolitan or Car & Driver?

Another idea to consider is ambush marketing or buzz marketing – advertising without buying advertising time! Quite a stir was also caused by creative media use at one of the previous World Cup soccer matches. The media chosen was … spectator heads! As you’d guess, it costs big bucks to be a sponsor of the World Cup — and banner advertising around the field is extremely expensive because of the huge number of households that tune into these games (no surprise here… the greater the audience, the more advertisers have to pay.) One company, Sanyo, gave away thousands of free, bright red baseball caps with the Sanyo logo emblazoned on it. As Sanyo hoped, spectators apparently thought the hat was cool enough to put right on. Every time the cameras panned the audience, there were rows of spectators wearing the hat, with the company name in big bold print, right on center stage. And other than the cost of the hats, the company hadn’t paid a dime for this exposure.

Moral: there’s room for resourcefulness here!

Now, how often do you schedule your ads? There is a time-honored theory in advertising that, on average, customers aren’t even aware that they’ve been exposed to your ad until they’ve been exposed to it for the third time – unless, of course, the ad is tremendously engaging and simply begs our attention.

Some common scheduling strategies include:

Continuous, which is a constant advertising presence – think of a company like McDonald’s that is advertising everywhere throughout the year.
Pulsing, which combines continuous advertising with bursts during key periods (think of a jewelry store – people always have birthdays so they do a small level of continuous advertising with bursts around Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.)
Flighting, which has periods of heavy advertising followed by no advertising (think seasonal products like sunscreen or Halloween candy).

Some questions to answer when thinking about scheduling:

How many exposures should you plan? (Probably a minimum of three – a good rule of thumb – although based on conversations with media buyers, radio media salespeople seem to be pushing more exposures).
When should you schedule your ads to run?
How closely should you space these ads? If you space exposures to your message too far apart, your customers will forget all about you in between ads and you basically have to start all over again. (But if you space them too closely, it can annoy your customers.)

Example 1: watch for several exposures to the same company’s ads in the same edition of a newspaper or magazine — perhaps spaced just a page or two apart. Often, a company will mass their exposures in a single medium all at once, just to make sure that their ad breaks through to your awareness. (Again, on the web and on TV, this can become annoying – think GEICO, The Carpet Guys, Wallside Windows and Sam Bernstein — but in less intrusive print media, we often don’t even know that it’s been done.)

Example 2: FOX2 bought radio spots for one night’s primetime programming and their 10pm News. They were required by the FOX network (they paid for ½ of the radio buy!) to run one spot an hour on radio stations in the target market of the buy from 6am-8pm. The buy only ran for one day, but by buying like this, they hypothetically could reach 40% of our target audience, and that target audience would hear the spot (exposure) between 2-3 times that day. We say “hypothetically” because the radio station was bought based on prior ratings of the station. You don’t know how many people are listening that day until later on down the line. The same goes for TV ratings, newspaper & magazine circulation and outdoor viewings.

OK, so now that you know what your media will be, it’s time to get into the fun stuff

Step 6 – Craft the Message – the actual ad itself

This is where the real creativity comes into play. How do you take that platform and translate it into words and images that will ring true with your customers and push that hot button? You’ll need to watch some TV, surf some web sites and read some magazines over this 2-week period to analyze how the pros do it – a tough assignment, but someone’s got to do it!

There are two parts to an ad: the copy and the artwork.

Copy refers to the words in an ad.

In a print ad, for example, it would be the headline, the sub-headline, the body copy (or the paragraphs of text), and the signature (or the name/logo of the advertiser).
In a radio or TV ad, it is the script spoken by the announcer or the actors.
On a website, it is all of the written words on the web page.

The artwork is everything else:

In print, it is the illustrations, photos, sketches, colors, and the way everything is laid out on the page. Some layouts are simple. Some are cluttered. Some are colorful. Some are monochromatic. There’s an endless variety here. Watch for this as you are taking a break from your schoolwork! Which ads caught your eye? Why? And (very important!) do you remember who the advertiser was?
In TV, it is the full screen graphics, the words on the screen, the visual special effects, or the actual physical set on which the commercial is shot.
On the web, it is like print ads, but could also include animations, moving banners, etc.

To recap, here in Step 6 (Ad Message), we are taking the Platform identified in Step 4 — and converting it into actual words and symbols. This is much easier said than done! Think about developing the “message” part of an ad – it’s absolutely critical, but it can be a challenge!

Which of the following headlines do you think conveys the theme in a more attention-getting, more memorable way – while still creating the right image:

Platform A: Macomb’s tuition is lower than other local schools

Message 1: “Macomb: the cheapest school around”

Message 2: “Macomb: the best value in education”

Platform B: Toshiba is a leading-edge company.

Message 1: “Toshiba — a leading-edge company”.

Message 2: “Toshiba — in touch with tomorrow”.

Message 2 is most likely the winner in each example. While Messages 1 and 2 do convey the same theme, they don’t have equal creative effectiveness.

Again, watch for ads in your down time — look for both good and bad examples. Keep track of what words are being used – and what images are accompanying them.

Step 7 – Integrating Your Marketing Communication

This is the step that’s not in your book, but goes hand in hand with steps 5 and 6. This is where you find consistency in your advertising, your sales promotion, your public relations and your personal selling efforts. With so many different types of media, places to shop, etc, we need to coordinate our efforts! We want any touch point that people have with our brand or our product to be consistent. That means our logos need to all be the same (font, size, color) AND our message needs to be the same. Make sure you read more about PR and Sales Promotion in Chapter 17 and Personal Selling in Chapter 18!

For example, UPS does a great job with this. From their TV ads to the sides of their trucks, to their uniforms, to their coupons for the UPS Store, to their invoices and tracking sheets, it’s all about BROWN and the UPS logo. What can brown do for you? Plenty, because they are very consistent with every message they send out!

OK, so now that you know what your media will be, it’s time to get into the fun stuff…

Step 8 (Step 7 in your book) – Running the Ads/Evaluating their Effectiveness

You ran the ads. Now the question is: did they work? Did they accomplish the objective that was set out up there in Step 2?

Basically, you have 3 options for evaluating effectiveness:

Pre-testing the ad — try it out on test consumers before airing it (you’ll do this as part of Step 6).
Post-testing the ad — conduct research after the fact to judge consumer reaction.
Split run testing — conducting two ads simultaneously, and seeing which one “pulls” best.

Another way to evaluate effectiveness is to pull some data. If your goal was to increase brand awareness, to a research study before and after the campaign to measure. If your goal was to increase sales, look at the sales data. If your goal was to increase traffic count into your store, put a counter at the front of the store. You get the idea here… don’t just be happy the advertising campaign is over… make sure it worked, and if it didn’t, plan how it can work better the

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Preview YouTube video Super Bowl Commercial 2007