Mktg3023 : Marketing Strategy : Assessment Answers

1). You are required to pick at least 3 current contemporary practitioner advertising issues

2). Include the background and context of the advertising issues 
3). Evidence of critical thinking discussion & evaluation and analysis of the developing topic
4). Evidence of analytical capabilities in interpreting supporting   academic material to support your critical discussion

5). Implications in relation to the practitioner  in advertising
6). Reference to supporting evidence from academic journals/additional appropriate sources

Advertisement blocking- There is huge cost expenditure in this field,  blocking advertisements can cost up to billions of dollars to the advertisers, under this the company's ads get blocked through a software or in easy words the software prevents the advertisement to even appear on the screen it that costs the brand a lot because already they have spent so much on the advertisement and blocking it makes it impossible to even present their cases in front of the receivers (Nobre and Silva, 2014).  But there are some ways through which the brand can make their point and present it to the receivers there are several methods like presenting the ad like a native ad they are designed in such a way that they look exactly like some editorial presentation or content which can easily let the advertisement to go through all the defenses used by the receiver, it helps the advertiser to save the money used in the advertisement from getting wasted and using the advertisement in a modified way so that it becomes hard for the receiver to avoid it as it is presented in such a manner that is in the interest of the user also making it hard for the ad blocker software to detect the advertisement (Strauss and Frost, 2016).

Issues faced by the political and legal environment

Walmart (wmt, +0.52%) specialist in Slidell, La., in June baked a cake with the ISIS signal on it, incredibly unconscious it was the pennant of the dangerous radical gathering that has assumed control expansive swathes of Syria and Iraq. Turns out the cake was connected to another contention encompassing Walmart the previous summer: its choice to quit offering any stock with the Confederate banner on it (Wahba 2015). The Walmart client in Slidell was irate when the store dismissed his demand for a cake with the Confederate banner, so he tried the retailer by asking for one with the ISIS cake. The retailer later apologized for the ISIS cake. The above presented example is an issue that will be affecting the business entity on legal and political aspects. There are countries and nations, and in those nations, there are central authorities as well as legal bodies which govern the area (Piercy, 2014). According to those parties all the framework of how to operate and proceed with any type of activity whether in business or in daily life,  such that there are some rules for the advertisements of a product which has to be followed by companies while promoting their product (Agency management Institute 2016). For example promotion of controversial products such as cigarettes and alcohol are restricted by many of the countries which have to be followed as soon as the political bodies do not permit. Such that rules create issues in preparation of the product advertisement in today's world which creates a huge problem further for the companies to actualize as to how to advertise and what to advertise (Parente and Hutchinson, 2014). In this case, a company has to make other ways to promote its product so that the people are made aware of the products (Hunt, 2014). There are set of rules which are formed by the constitution of a country and those rules are imposed to be followed by each and every business of the area. There're many types of permits and licenses which have to be obtained by companies in order to promote their products in a particular nation.  This is important for every firm to have set of rules according to the legal rules in the company's operations. Such that there are rules for advertisement which are mandatory for the companies to be followed. These play a significant role for the sustainable development or otherwise, a company may face any type of legal actions against it which are more badly in case of a large firm operating for a particular product in a nation (Angell and Kraemer, 2017). Huge penalties for not following the regulations are imposed on businesses while they exploit any type of rules regarding advertisements. There are set of rules such as advertisement must not include any type of criticism such as racism, castes or any kind of exploitation and even some companies are not allowed to promote their products in some markets which are also a rule of a particular market which has to be followed (Open Forum 2014). Such these rules are important and have to be followed.

Making use of un-ethical means

Advertisements for Dannon's mainstream Activia mark yogurt handled the organization with a class activity settlement of $45 million out of 2010, as per ABC News. The yogurts were advertised as being "clinically" and "logically" demonstrated to support your insusceptible framework and ready to manage absorption. The Activia promotion crusade, fronted by on-screen character Jamie Lee Curtis, asserted that the yogurt had extraordinary bacterial fixings. Subsequently, the yogurt was sold at 30% higher costs than other comparative items. In any case, the Cleveland judge directing the case said that these cases were problematic. The claim against Dannon started in 2008, when purchaser Trish Wiener held up a grumbling. Over the fine of $45 million, Dannon was requested to evacuate "clinically" and "experimentally demonstrated" from its names, as indicated by ABC (Helpern 2016). Expressions like "clinical investigations appear" were considered admissible. Dannon denied any bad behavior and guaranteed it settled the claim to "evade the cost and diversion of case." A set of rules which are basic and inherent for a business which has to be there at every level and every operation for the right proceeding of business activities (Nowak and Paton, 2018). Ethics completely justifies the explanation of what is right and what is wrong. Every country has some or the other specified rules which are good for it and some rules which are not good for it. If a company does not follow these rules it faces problems regarding acceptance of the products by the people of the society as if the company will not follow the rules it will do wrong activities which will result in more problems for the firm. For example, charging a particular amount form one area and another amount from another in a door to door selling is not ethical and it has to be taken-care by the company (Babin and Zikmund, 2015). This creates retention problem for the company in long term. These issues are contemporizing which occurs while positioning of a product in a market and this is important for the development of business to have a proper goodwill in the market. Fraud and misrepresentations always cause huge disliking amongst the public for the company which is a huge problem for the company and has to be solved by following the right way of doing business by following all the rules which have been implemented by the legal bodies of a nation (Sheth and Sisodia, 2015).

Impact of social media on contemporary advertising

Web based life organizations have lost a lot of trust from the British open over the ways they gather information and the negative practices they empower, as indicated by advertising organization Edelman (Cross 2018). Edelman's 2018 Trust Barometer, which measures worldwide trust in governments, organizations and media, finds a lion's share in the UK trust online life organizations take part in shady practices around information, and might want to see more done to direct them. The Trust Barometer overviewed more than 3,000 respondents in the UK to check their trust in an assortment of organizations. The information for web-based social networking organizations was featured by Edelman as the most critical in the UK this year as results found a large amounts of doubt in the business. The study featured different issues for web based life as well, with recognizable reactions around counterfeit news and fanaticism springing up of course. Fifty-three percent of respondents said they stress in regards to being presented to counterfeit news via web-based networking media, and seven of every ten said they don't think web based life organizations do what's necessary to counteract sharing of fanatic substance on their stages. Edleman's UK CEO Ed Williams anyway trusts that internet based life organizations can enhance their picture themselves on the off chance that they invest the essential exertion. "It's chance these organizations sat up and tuned in. The general population need activity on key issues identified with online assurance, and to see their worries tended to through better direction. Disappointment on their part to act hazards promote disintegration of trust and along these lines open help," he said. On the basis of the research it has been executed that there are number of issues that come up by making use of social media. Nowadays, an advertisement is the basic tool used by a company to address their target audience and to let them know about the products launched by the company and to convey the brand story (Nobre and Silva, 2014). To make this happen there are so many ways through which an organization can spread awareness among the consumers but social media leaves a greater impact on the people because billions and trillions of people are using social media currently and it becomes easy to contact this amount of people on a single and huge platform but despite all these benefits, advertising on social media comes with some drawbacks too (Ernst and Dolnicar, 2018). For instance, when a company decides to advertise their product on social media then the first and the most basic thing that they would require will be a qualified person who can manage their social media handle and the whole brand marketing but it is not as easy as it sounds because first of all the company requires to find a person who is qualified enough to fit the criteria and then they have to manage the budget issues because social media experts cost a large amount to do their work (Babin and Zikmund, 2015). And if all the previously mentioned issues are resolved, then there comes another issue related to managing the advertising content by the expert and the pressure on them to design a creative content which will attract more and more customers and then be put on social media according to a schedule (Fornell and Wernerfelt, 2013). For example, the experts have to make sure that they post the advertisements according to the season of sale that is if there is the high level of sale going then the advertising should be done at a high rate as compared to rest of the year of the time during there is a minimum sale going. All these things and complex issues make it tough for a person to handle the company's social media and that is why the social media experts charges a large amount of money to manage the advertising content on the social platform which gives rise to another issue that is budgeting issue. With the increasing demand of social media the web developers are nowadays charging a good amount of money from the advertisers and over expanding can lead to a poor business because a company cannot put all its money only on the advertising and marketing campaign (Mokwa, 2017). Because there are other issues that need to be handled financially so it becomes quite difficult for the company to come up with the new solution to handle all these problems.

Another issue is to convey the brand story to the target audience and it is the crucial stem and the most important step (Friedman, 2018). Although it is easy to get connected to millions of people over social media and convey the brand story the problem arises at how to convey the brand story and when? Different people have different choices and this thing is what makes the process complicated, advertises are required to first evaluate and examine their customers then design the advertisement according to their needs and then present the advertisement displaying all the objectives of the company on it that can easily convince the receiver and will leave a good impact on the consumer the key to this is being creative and innovative and come up with different new ideas that can attract the consumers because if consumers are happy then the company automatically will be successful as consumers play the major role in the marketing so the company need to focus more and more on them. if the advertiser gets success in making a creative advertisement then there comes another hurdle which is ad block (Hatheway, Kwan and Zheng, 2017). Because of ads people cannot browse the sites normally so they try  to get rid of all the ads with the help of some  software and they can choose what they want to see and this costs a great amount to the company because the advertisement got blocked and consumer is not able to see the company’s objectives so to overcome this issue a lot of efforts are to be put in the advertisement (Liu, Liao, Huang and Liao, 2018). For instance, the advertisement should be designed in such a format that the user is not able to resist it, the advertisement should be short and attractive, displaying all the objectives clearly and would be able to get through all the defenses used by the users.

While connecting to the consumers over social media the advertiser is required to establish a contact with the consumers regarding all kind of complaints as well as queries and also be able to always available for them when needed, but it is quite impossible it costs a lot of time and money and also the major issue is week servers (Hunt, 2014). Because whenever servers are down it becomes very hard for the advertisers to establish a connection with the customers which can create so many issues and if consumers cannot contact the advertisers directly then they will loose interests in the products and try to go somewhere else which can cause major loss to the company although nowadays this is a basic thing for any company  to be in touch with the customers but it is very hard to manage and not at all easy as it sounds and causes a lot to the company to employ this amount of employees and then paying all these people. maintaining and ensuring trust is essential as people are just watching the advertisement before checking the product so the company has to make sure that all its objectives are displayed in the advertisement (Jaworski, 2018). And also should be better than the competition because if the company's campaign is good then the company will get a competitive advantage over its rivals and attract more and more people to join the brand but to make sure that they are best than the rivalries. The advertiser needs to use the best and latest technology which again raises the financial issues and affects them, with all the modern technologies each and every brand is trying to present their website or social media handle better than others. So this is another one of the challenges faced by contemporary advertising over social media (Kotler, 2015). To make the website attractive the advertisers need to come up with creative content that requires a good team of content writers and qualified person who can represent the objectives of advertisers in a new way and is good at telling stories because this is what needed for an amazing content that will influence a large crowd. Another thing is to come up with a great tagline, so that just by reading it people will know the company’s objective and about their products leaving a strong impression on the target audience (Keegan and Rowley, 2017). However it is very easy to use social media for advertising but all these issues make it impossible slightly and the advertisers face all these challenges but the major challenge, as discussed earlier are budgeting and contacting the target audience.

Financially it becomes quite impossible to spend a large amount of money only on advertising rather than the betterment or production of the products and also when it comes to the customers (Kitchenham, Mendes and Travassos, 2007). It is very important to maintain the contact with them in case of any troubles faced by them or if they want to inquire about anything and maintaining the trust between the customers and the company as all these issues can affect the company’s progress adversely and can lead to low progress.

Conclusion:

After analyzing the above-presented essay it has been inferred that the concept of advertising is considered one of the most crucial and empirical tasks for any of the business corporation. But due to fluctuations in trends and business environment, increasing globalization and intensification of a competitive environment has developed the varied range of challenges for advertising. The above essay is focused on the contemporary practitioner issues with the advertising.   

Introduction:

Fulfilling the demands and offering a high level of satisfaction to the consumers is the prime motive of a business corporation and for attaining the same a firm is required to make implementation of the varied range of plans and tactics (Posner, Williams and Posner, 2015). Marketing strategy is one of the concepts that can be considered as a tool or mechanism for developing and accomplishing the desired targets and objectives. The present scenario is based on the concept of e-portfolio that can be described as an electronic evidence combined and managed by the user by making use of online means. E-portfolio can also be defined as a digital collection of documents and work that presents and showcases the skills and abilities and prosperity over time. The below presented is the summary that has been extracted by analyzing the concepts of marketing strategy and e-portfolio. The developed portfolio will be majorly focused on the contemporary practitioner advertising issues

References:

Agency management Institute, (2016) The biggest challenges by the agency, [online] Available from https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/biggest-agency-challenges/ [Accessed on 18th June 2018]

Angell, R.L. and Kraemer, J.R. (2017) International Business Machines Corp, Automatically generating an optimal marketing strategy for improving cross sales and sales of items. U.S. Patent. 13(1), 45-49.

Babin, B.J. and Zikmund, W.G. (2015) Exploring marketing research. Cengage Learning.

Cross, T, (2018) [Online]. Almost two third of UK public believe social media companies sell their data without consent, Available at: https://videoadnews.com/2018/01/22/almost-two-thirds-of-uk-public-believe-social-media-companies-sell-their-data-without-consent/. [Assessed on 24^th June 2018].  

Ernst, D. and Dolnicar, S. (2018) How to avoid random market segmentation solutions. Journal of Travel Research, 57(1), pp.69-82.

Fornell, C. and Wernerfelt, B. (2013) Defensive marketing strategy by customer complaint management: a theoretical analysis. Journal of Marketing research, pp.337-346.

Friedman, D. (2018) The double auction market institution: A survey. The double auction market (pp. 3-26). California: Routledge.

Hatheway, F., Kwan, A. and Zheng, H. (2017) An Empirical Analysis of Market Segmentation on US Equity Markets. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 52(6), pp.2399-2427.

Helpern, W, (2016) [Online]. 18 false advertising scandals that costs some brands millions, Available at: https://www.businessinsider.in/18-false-advertising-scandals-that-cost-some-brands-millions/articleshow/51630709.cms. [Assessed on 24^th June 2018].

Hicks, C.C., et al (2016) Engage key social concepts for sustainability. Science, 352(6281), pp.38-40.

Hunt, S.D. (2014) Marketing theory: foundations, controversy, strategy, and resource-advantage theory. New York: Routledge.

Jaworski, B.J. (2018) Commentary: Advancing marketing strategy in the marketing discipline and beyond. Journal of Marketing Management, 34(1), pp.63-70.

Keegan, B.J. and Rowley, J. (2017) Evaluation and decision making in social media marketing. Management Decision, 55(1), pp.15-31.

Kitchenham, B.A., Mendes, E. and Travassos, G.H. (2007) Cross versus within-company cost estimation studies: A systematic review. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 33(5). Pp.52-68.

Kotler, P. (2015) Framework for marketing management. Pearson Education India.

Liu, J., Liao, X., Huang, W. and Liao, X. (2018) Market segmentation: A multiple criteria approach combining preference analysis and segmentation decision. New York: Elsevier.

Mokwa, M.P., (2017) The policy characteristics and organizational dynamics of social marketing. In Marketing the Public Sector (pp. 43-55). California: Routledge.

Nobre, H. and Silva, D. (2014) Social network marketing strategy and SME strategy benefits. Journal of Transnational Management, 19(2), pp.138-151.

Nowak, R. and Paton, E. (2018) SWOT analysis of The Brain Dialogue, an Australian prototype Responsible Research and Innovation engagement program for neuroscience. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 5(1), pp.131-142.

Open Forum, (2014) Challenges facing today’s advertising company, [online]. Available from https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/challenges-facing-todays-advertising-company/ [Accessed on 18th June 2018].

Parente, D. and Strausbaugh-Hutchinson, K. (2014) Advertising campaign strategy: A guide to marketing communication plans. Cengage Learning.

Piercy, N. (2014) Export Strategy: Markets and Competition (RLE Marketing). New York: Routledge.

Posner, H., Williams, S. and Posner, H. (2015) Marketing fashion: strategy, branding and promotion. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Pride, W. and Ferrell, O.C. (2015) Marketing 2016. Boston, MA: United States: Cengage Learning.

Sheth, J.N. and Sisodia, R.S. (2015) Does marketing need reform?: Fresh perspectives on the future. New York: Routledge.

Strauss, J. and Frost, R.D. (2016) E-marketing: Instructor's Review Copy. New York: Routledge.

Wahba. P, (2015) [Online]. Hall of shame: The 9 worst marketing fails by retailers in 2015, Available at: https://fortune.com/2015/12/22/retail-ads-worst-2015/. [Assessed on 24^th June 2018].