Kayla_Chp21

False Advertising Scandals

Untruthful and deceptive advertising was discussed in chapter 21, as well as a couple of other chapters. Chapter 20 also discussed legal barriers false advertisements. So I found an article that combines the two.

14 False Advertising Scandals That Cost Brands Millions

Kayla_Chp20

A Well Done Advertisement

Pandering to Everyone

I saw this advertisement on Facebook and actually saved it for the purpose of my next blog post. In class we've been talking about how to target different groups of consumers, but I thought this ad did a really good job of targeting numerous groups. For example, "you might be mistaken for an outdoorsy guy".

This targets people, namely fathers (since it's advertised on pages for men such as Fatherly), who aren't really outdoorsy, but want to appear that way. It also target people who really are outdoorsy, but want the convenience of a Qube tent. It also attracts people who frequently camp in large groups. This might also pander to families in which the parents might want some privacy from their kids at times. It also attracts adults who like to camp, but whose kids might be to young or just not appreciate it through their solar powered charging stations.

Kayla_Chp18

In-store Advertising

This chapter mentioned in-store advertising, but didn't make any definitive claims about whether or not it is effective, based on the fact that it's a relatively recent development. According to the Marshall Insights article (second link), they are effective. Brand recall among those who were viewing the ads in the store (in this case Walmart) was at 65%, while those who were basing their answers off of ads they'd viewed only at home was at 23%. Additionally, shoppers in a different study rated ads in-store as slightly more effective than ads they'd seen at home (first link).

http://www.marketingcharts.com/traditional/in-store-ads-more-effective-than-out-of-store-8623/
https://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/insights/2010/why-store-tv-advertising-works

Kayla_Chp15

Etsy

I saw that someone else wrote about Pinterest, which lead me to think of Etsy. Etsy is essentially the amazon of homemade and vintage items. In fact, according to this article, people get angry when they think that the items might not have been made by hand. In 2014, they made over 1.93 billion dollars in merchandise sales. Personally, I have bought a custom engraved-buckle dog collar for Milo (he always loses tags), and several personalized items for my room as well as jewelry since I first discovered Etsy. A lot of the sellers rely on Pinterest and other social media platforms to get them noticed. For example, the woman I bought my dog's collar from gave me 20% off my next purchase when I showed that I made a post about it on Instagram. Sellers can also pay to have their stores "promoted" on Etsy, but that requires people to know about Etsy in the first place. But I came across them when I was searching for a very specific item that I could customize, so Google definitely recognizes that they exist.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/business/media/etsys-success-raises-problems-of-credibility-and-scale.html?_r=0

(Sorry, that I won't be there, I'm still running a participant. Also, take my capstone for CE Points and a chance to win a $50 gift card! ;) )

Kayla_Chp12

Magazine and Newspaper Ad Placements Gone Wrong

Since this chapter was about print advertising, I thought it would be fun to look at times when the people laying out the pages should have thought twice... or three times. 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/newspaper-and-magazine-layout-disasters?utm_term=.gt878vM8Ga#.xoqj7kD72J

Kayla_Chp11

Why Syndicated Programs Are Always Out of Order

 One show that I love is Flashpoint. It's a crime show based on a SWAT team - complete with snipers, hand-to-hand combat, and tense scenes. Once I found the show on an old satellite station, (it mainly focused on soap operas like One Tree Hill and Days of Our Lives, although I would not, in a long shot, consider Flashpoint a soap opera) I set out to watch all of the episodes. I quickly noticed however, that they were sometimes out of order, or would skip whole sections of the season. In one episode, the two team members who had some chemistry had just decided to go on a date, and two days later they were engaged to be married. *Spoiler alert*, am I right.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/12/tube_tied.html

So according to this article, it's done for the sake of economics. Popular episodes are played more frequently, and unpopular episodes are skipped, regardless of the chronology of the series.

Great for true lovers of the series, terrible for people who actually want to watch the series.

Kayla_Chp10

Buying Power Index

I was somewhat confused by the idea of buying power index, so I decided to look up an article to explain it in a different way. I was also interested in what parts of the country have the highest buying power, so I found an article that has both.

Dallas, Texas is the highest at 1.919 and Honolulu Hawaii is the lowest at 0.571.

Kansas City, MO ranks at 1.169 and St. Louis is at 1.126.

http://www.nalp.org/buying_power_index_class_of_2011

Here's an image from another website that puts it into perspective visually:

https://taxfoundation.org/real-value-100-each-state-2016/

Kayla_Chp9 - Informational VS. Emotional Appeal

Informational VS. Emotional Appeal

Chapter 9 talked about both informational or scientific advertisements, which target consumers with statistics and facts about why their product is better, as well as emotional advertisements, which focus on your feelings. I decided to look for an article that discusses which is seen as better and more effective.

Overall, the answer seems to be that no one knows. Scientific appeals seem to work better for things we need, but emotional appeals may work better for things we want, but don't really need.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/thinking-vs-feeling-the-psychology-of-advertising/247466/

Kayla_Chp8

Psychographics

How to Use Psychographics in Your Marketing: A Beginner's Guide

I found the concept of psychographic studies intriguing. While demographics answer the question of 'who?', psychographics serve to answer the question 'why?'. This article discusses what psychographics are, how to obtain them, and how to use them to improve your marketing.

Kayla_Chp6

Chapter 6 discussed using celebrities to endorse their products. The chapter also discussed the risks of using celebrities, largely their often unpredictable behavior. Forbes put out a slideshow of 28 disastrous celebrity endorsements, since their all on different pages, I've included the links to just a few of what I thought were the worst below. One ad that seemed to have bad luck was the Got Milk? campaign.

Walmart and Kathy Lee Gifford's  Child Slavery
Madonna and Pepsi - From Squeaky Clean to Not-so-family-friendly
5 Major Celebrity Endorsements Gone Wrong

Kayla_SuperBowlAd - Tide

Although I thought that a lot of other ads were funny or creative (like Buick or Honda), I overall thought that Tide did the best job. Prior to the Super Bowl, they released teaser videos about how terrible the dry cleaner is.

During the Super Bowl, the old man Bradshaw, from their teaser commercials, had a stain on his shirt while he was talking to an announcer. I even thought why the heck would someone let him in front of a camera like that?

The next commercial was a tide commercial. Following the commercial break, Bradshaw was back with the announcer with a clean, bright white, shirt.

https://www.google.com/amp/ftw.usatoday.com/2017/02/super-bowl-51-commercial-ads-tide-terry-bradshaw-stain-bradshawstain-video/amp?client=ms-android-att-us

#BradshawStain became a successful hashtag temporarily.

Kayla_Chp5

Tostito's Breathalyzer Bag

via GIPHY

Superbowl Sunday is approaching, and Tostito's decided to break out a limited edition, high-tech bag. The bag claims to have a functional and accurate breathalyzer, that, if you are over the limit, it will begin to flash a red light that tells you not to drink and drive. If you are legally capable of driving, however, it will light up green. Some report that the bag also has an NFC tag that will call an uber for you, as well as provide a $10 discount.

Decoding as we learned in chapter 5, however, is heavily influenced by our past experiences and perceptions. Law enforcement officials have decided this as a disaster waiting to happen. My lawyer brain decoded it as a lawsuit waiting to happen. My friend, who is planning to do graphic design in advertising, thought that it was an ingenious marketing strategy.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how this all turns out.

http://kfor.com/2017/01/28/new-tostitos-bag-that-acts-as-breathalyzer-causing-controversy/

http://www.geek.com/tech/this-bag-of-tostitos-is-also-a-breathalyzer-that-calls-an-uber-if-youre-drunk-1686713/

Kayla_Chp4

I actually had to check and make sure that I was in the right course while I was going back through the powerpoint. There were so many mentions of psychology in this chapter! (Even psychoanalytic theory, which I admittedly chuckled at.) So for this post, I thought I would focus on some other ways psychology is used to "manipulate" people into buying things.

In one of my independent studies on how people make decisions, such as what to buy or not to buy, we discussed how we can manipulate people into making the decisions that we want. There are six major ways, according to Robert Cialdini, that we can do this:

Consistency - we need to make our actions match our beliefs.(Getting parents to agree to buy a toy for their child, but then undersupplying the toy around Christmastime, so parents buy something else for Christmas and buy the promised toy after Christmas.)
Reciprocation - The "not so free free present"
Social Proof - everyone else is doing it.
Authority - Good for professionals like lawyers and doctors.
Liking - Use people who are most like your target audience, or who your target audience will most like.
and Scarcity - Scarcity=valuable (Get it before it's gone!)

Another technique that was mentioned in the book, but not in either of the below websites was the foot-in-the-door technique to increase sales. The idea is, for example with donations, that once you get someone to commit to donating something small, like $5, it will be easier to get them to donate larger amounts later on.

There is also the opt-out technique, which is being used now for organ donation. People are much more likely for a number of reasons to be less likely to opt-out of something than to opt-in to something.

The book athat I read for the course was much longer, over 30 pages, but I found a few websites that go in depth on the six principles without going over the top!

https://www.influenceatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/E_Brand_principles.pdf

https://collegeinfogeek.com/principles-of-influence/

Kayla_Chp2

The Risk of Re-branding

I thought that for my post, I would expand on the concept of branding, and why rebranding can actually be risky. I'm actually a psych major finishing up an elective requirement, and I've studied marketing before, but from the perspective of manipulation and the way that people make decisions, rather than business.


The link that I chose is:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unconscious-branding/201306/how-marketers-manipulate-you-without-your-knowing


The article is talking about how our minds make associations between everything from stoves being hot and painful to touch to various brands having certain traits that make us happy for whatever reason. These associations even become unconscious (most of us probably don't actively think every time we see a stove that we shouldn't touch it because we'll be burned). His discusses how the color green is associated with "minty freshness" and so companies dye their toothpaste and mouthwash green to encourage people to buy their products.

I thought that the following segment was particularly interesting:

"People may not really know why they love one brand and not another, because conscious thought may have had little to do with the emotional tags that were formed when their preferences were learned. For example, a leading beverage company created a sound when opening the can that was subtly different from other cans to trigger a unique craving for their brand’s drink. The manufacturer redesigned the can to create a differentiating snapping sound, a branded cue of delicious anticipation. They then recorded the sound in a studio and incorporated it into advertising. The manufacturer would play the sound at major concerts and sporting events, seeing an instant uptick in sales for their brand when they did so. Yet when consumers were asked why they suddenly choose that particular beverage over another they would say things like “I haven’t the faintest idea, I just fell for it.”"

On the topic of re-branding, it can be risky because of these associations. The article also talks about how a re-branding effort to make soda seem more healthy by making it clear, failed miserably. The consumers had come to connect the brown color of the soda to the taste of the company. When the manufacturers chose to make it clear, the drink was no longer associated to the delicious flavor that the consumers loved, and so sales dropped tremendously. 

There are lots of other interesting concepts that are connected between psychology and marketing. So much so that one of the women in some of my psychology courses did an entire project, I actually believe it was her thesis, on the connection between the two and how to use psychology to market things more successfully.