Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Blog Neuf- Advertising

Blog 9
Advertising
“Advertising in the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media.”(Bovee,1992,p.7)

The Audience and communicating are key aspects you have to consider when advertising. The audience changes depending on where they fit in in the market. Then communication, communication is key you should make sure your advert appeals to the customer usually through sound sight and sense.  Strong and weak theory of Advertising, strong theory is based on Lewis (H of E) developed by jones1991. Strong theory takes the more traditional approach and basis the basis being that adverting can persuade someone to buy a product that they have never previously purchased. It suggests that advertisement can change the attitudes, desire and reflection that the customer has of a product. If this is successful then this encourages the customer to purchase or re purchase a product. Celebrity endorsers can be used to persuade the audience to purchase; this can make a product desirable. The aim is to make sure the advert is in their memory so that they may not buy it at the point but may in the future. The weak theory by Ehrenberg (1988) suggests that adverts are not effective from defining one product from another. Weak adverting is thought to be effective in the long run, but not so effective in the short run.

I will now look into the advertising used for the two events I have been following
First I will look the advertising for the Country Living Spring Fair, the key ways that they advertise is through their website, through the Country Living Magazine and then through Magazine in the same genre.  The events customer database are usually loyal customers of the magazine so they would be in the know about the event without needing advertising to persuade them to go. What the event does need to advertise is that its available to put have a stall and sell your own products, so they also need to advertise that they do that on the website.
This is a poster of the Country Living Fair they use slogans that could be meaning to say that they know your already coming.


Drake
Drake tour is a sell-out tour even with extra dates added. This means that advertising isn’t really necessary; I did some advertising about the tour such as posters videos via his blog. Some say this isn’t an effective way of advertising but for the target market that drake hits this is the type of advertising he needs to be doing.

This is the poster for his tour
One effective way of being advertised is via music channel website radio, radio websites this is where Drake gets most talking about and when searching online, sites like mtv, capital all had his tour dates up on their website as soon as it was released.
I think both events are strong theory advertising they both self-promote them self via their websites ext. and by doing this they are more likely to sell tickets to their events. Both events have a different style of advertising but both use the same methods, except for the social media side in which drake uses to the best of its ability unlike the non-existent page for the Country Living Spring Fair. Even though both events are completely different they both have the same aim and that is to attract their target market who are their key customers,



So I have reached the end of my blog. I hope you have enjoyed reading it and reading my views. I had 300+ views last time i looked yay!

Fran J


Post Huit- Sponsorship


Sponsorship

‘Sponsorship is a mutually beneficial arrangement that consist of the provision of resources of funds, goods and/or services…in return for a set of rights that can be used in communications activity, for the achievements of objectives for commercial gain.’
Masterman, Guy (2007) Sponsorship for a return on investment, London: Elsevier

To sponsor something is to support an event, activity, person, or organization financially or through the provision of products or services. There are three types of sponsor.
  • Cooperate
  • Trust and foundation
  • Individual

Being a sponsor gives you a competitive advantage it helps awareness of your product, helps build the image of the product, and then helps to develop and maintain the relationship between customer and product.

The country Living Fair has 3 sponsors.



Windsmoor is one of four unique brands owned by Jacques Vert Plc.
With a strong British heritage that spans over 75 years, Windsmoor has built its reputation on an exclusive foundation of craftsmanship and timeless styling.

Ecover is a Belgium based company manufacturing and internationally trading domestic ecological cleaning products, of which it is the world's most well-known brand

                                                               
Rituals were founded in 2000 and were the first brand in the world to pioneer a combination of luxury Home and Body cosmetics.

As the events target market are women at the average age of 49  these three brands are very good they cover three areas that woman do in in their everyday lives, fashion, beauty and cleaning. The sponsors know by sponsoring these events they are targeting the exact market that will purchase from them
A Little Video Of one of the adverts of a Ecover

Drake

After looking all over the web seeing if I could find a sponsor for his world tour, I found out that he has no sponsorship for an artist to have a sponsor they had to be an extremely large name and because drake only target one genre of music he is not well known enough to be sponsored. The venues that he will play at will most likely be sponsored.

Blog Sept- Social Media


Blog Number 7
Social Media 

I will first show you a graph which shows the increase in unique visitors who visited social networking sited from home and work in June 2008 to march 2011. As you can see the number of visitors had increased dramatically since the first survey. This explains why social media is such an important aspect of marketing, to engage to that much of the population by posting a picture or tweeting something saves money on posters and radio adverts. It’s a cheaper way of advertising.

Facebook
When looking on Mintel the leading social network site is Facebook, with 73% of people using it, 57% of which use it daily meaning once a week or more. I decided that first I will find both of the Facebook pages. So I first search ‘country living spring fair’ into the search bar at the top no results, I then took out the ‘spring’ no results, i only got a result when I typed in ‘country living’ and then it only led me to the to the Country Living magazine, which  since following it has never wrote anything about the fair. So Country Living Fair has no Facebook page.



Drake- So I followed the link from Drakes website to his Facebook page, and he had an incredible 23,211,765 likes! There are 8 links on the side that lead to various pages, one to his wall post which are posted from his blog and twitter pages. Then other info like tracks videos, photos and a link to his blog, then lastly there is a link to his tour dates in which it has a nifty little tool which lets you follow him, and you will receive updates when any new tour dates are released, new songs and new pictures or videos. It’s actually very handy!  He does use the Facebook to his advantage this picture shows him advertising that more tickets are on sale.


Twitter
Next I looked at the second most popular social network site, twitter. Yet again like Facebook there is no twitter page for Country Living Spring Fair, only one for the magazine. Drake has 6,216,367 followers and he does use it regularly to post tweets about how he is feeling, artist he likes at the time, new videos.

Drake also has a YouTube, Vevo, MySpace page and Blog which are also very popular to. (he has to much time on his hands)
As you and I can see there is a big difference of how both events use social networking, for drake its his main way of advertising to his audience.  I think the main reason that The Country Living Spring fair do not use Social networking to their advantage is because their target market age are least likely to use social network sites. This can make it hard because maybe if they did have the pages then they could communicate with their customers quickly and update them on information and news like Drake does with his. 




References
www.facebook.com
www.twitter.com
ComSource/Mintel

Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Blog Six- EMAILS


Blog Number 6
 Emails

So let’s start off with some facts about emails!

  •     Radicati Group from April 2010 estimate the number of emails sent per day (in 2010) to be around 294 billion.
  •      294 billion messages per day means more than 2.8 million emails are sent every second and some 90 trillion emails are sent per year. Around 90% of these millions and trillions of messages are but spam and viruses.


Email Marketing Facts.

  •         E-mail click through ratio is best on Wednesdays, reaching 3.9%
  •         60% of business correspondence has grammar or spelling errors

 Here is a screenshot from Mintel showing the percentage of people who use email.
As you can see emailing is one of the most popular ways of communication around the world. Any business has to be up to date with last technology and new ways of communication, this being one of them.

The direct Marketing I received from Country living fair where via email, but after going through my millions of emails this may not be the case.  I signed up to the website to receive news and new information about the country living fair, but to my surprise the only email I have even received from them since signing up all the way back in January was my confirmation email to say Thank you for signing up. Though not receiving any information directly from them at the same time I also set up Google alerts which tells me when a new result has be found or if the website has had an update, from Google alerts I received 13 emails which isn’t very many considering I signed up back in January.  Drake has no where you can sign up to get a newsletter or anything so I didn’t receive any direct emails via that, but like before I signed up for goggle alerts and I was swamped, my phone was always buzzing and I have lost count of the amount of alerts I have received from Drake.

Here is a picture of my inbox and that’s just a page of goggle alerts! Comparing the two they are both similar maybe it was my words I used in the Drake Google alerts that caused me so many emails (3/4 of which were rubbish and had nothing to do with his tour) but I think both didn’t use the direct emailing system to its best ability considering I signed up for one and received nothing was disappointing. When you see how many people do use email like from the image from Mintel 86% of people use it and I think it’s a vital way to get a message across, and from doing further research people are most likely to open an email from a trustworthy business or service.




References


Thursday, 23 February 2012

Blog Cinq- Marketing Communication Objectives


Marketing Communication
Blog Number 5

So here is my fifth blog, and in this I will  be looking into the marketing communication objectives of my two chose events.
Firstly help everyone understand what I am talking about I will firstly explain what marketing communication is:

SO what is CommunicationIt is the activity of conveying information; this can be done via a variety of verbal and non-verbal communicating:
  • body language
  • eye contact
  • sign language
  • paralanguage
  • haptic communication
  • chronemics

Also through media such as
  •      pictures
  •      graphics
  •      sound
  •      writing


plan and creative strategy statements, the marketing communication objectives are determined by problems the target or product category may encounter and any market opportunities the product has to solve to overcome these problems.

Marketing communication objectives should describe what you want your target audience to think, feel, and do once you have told them your marketing message.

Over many years there have been many different models of communication, but one that gets used and shown a lot is the Wilbur Schramm’s 1954 communication process. Schramm intended for the process to be a two-way circular communication between the sender and receiver. Unlike many other models Schramm included the study of human behaviour in his.
From the picture this includes encoding, decoding, interpreting and message.



 Country Living Fair 
For the Country Living Fair they are likely to communicate with the Magazine buyers, general public and also business looking to exhibit their goods.  The types of communication may vary for who they looking to communicate to, they would communicate differently to the Magazine buyers who they are looking to see tickets to, as to the businesses that will be using their services.

Drake Tour 2012
Drakes Tour would be communication with the fans making sure they know the tour is happening that they are clear about dates, times and venues. The fans will buy the bulk of the tickets so communicating well with them is vital, making sure Drake is always bringing out something new to keep fans interested in his music.  Tickets for the tour are now sold out so this shows the communications has done well.


References



I will next post a couple of blogs direct marketing and social media. 

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Blog Quatre-Website Comparison Nombre Deux



 Blog Post 4 Website Comparison Part 2. Wow that was a mouthful anyways….

I am moving swiftly on and now going to do exactly what I did before but instead of typing the ‘Country Living Spring Fair’ into the search engines I will type in ‘Drake Tour 2012’ and will then compare my results.
So as like before I will start off with the most popular search engine Google, after searching ‘Drake tour 2012’ I got a huge 55,900,000 results in just 0.13 seconds a huge number of results.  I then went onto look at the top three results, all three websites being a site that you can purchase tickets on.  I was surprised not to see his official website not on the first page; it wasn't even on the second page yet on the third page half way down! This is odd as the official website is a key marketing point and information point for customers, I will be researching later on why it was so far down.



Though his website is not on the first page big companies in the music business have links on the first page, including MTV and Capital FM these companies can have a serious effect on the event as if they post a bad article it can mean that you’re in danger of not selling tickets.

Now for Bing
Interesting Bing has come out lower this time with only 17,000,000 considerably less than Google.  The first link is a sponsorship link which is to a Viagogo this means that they pay Bing to let them have to top spot. They don’t need it as they have 4 links on the first page and then they also pay for the bottom sponsorship space. The first Link under sponsorship is actually to Bings own Events page where you can go onto it find when and where the event is pick a date and it will find tickets for you. I think this is a very handy page.  So I have just added to the statistics but I attempted to search how many pages down it would be until I clicked on Drake’s official website… well I got to 11 my eyes were going square and still no sign of his site.
 Lastly Yahoo (like before I’m posting this because it makes me laugh (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIPmS4Pb0ww&feature=related)   so yahoo gave me 16,900,000 results. As you can see yahoo has 4 sponsored results at the top, two of which are official ticket companies but two could be riskier and could be fake. Viagogo has top spot again and Get me in, which is Ticketmaster sister site has second spot. Viagogo is also seen on the first page three times. 
Again I thought I would look for the official Website but no luck. 


This got me a little confused as to whether I should look into Drake Official Website into more detail this is because from researching about his tour his website doesn’t seem to have much to do with this and has no link.
I come to the decision that I would look into his official website if a customer wanted to know any information then they would most likely go onto the website first.

Like before I have done a screen shot to show you what I’m looking at.
So when you first enter the sight it’s very sleek and clean there is no fancy video links just a picture of him and an article/review about his recent album ‘Take Care’.  This doesn’t help his ticket sales as this is more promoting his Album. We then go onto the see the next thing which is a list of link on the far left and also on the bottom right corner. These links are the same and in the same order. Drake’s tour dates link is the third top and once clicked on this takes you to the dates and links to where you can purchase them.  This will increase ticket sales as it’s easily seen and read and has easy access to the necessary websites needed to buy tickets. You then go on to the next links which are then the social media side of it and these link to his MySpace, YouTube channel, and twitter account. This is very important because this is how fans can see what the start is up to at all times.



 COMPARING

So now I’m going to compare the two websites, I will carry on in the same order as what I have done in the blog so I will first compare my search engine results. When I searched The Country Living Fair it had a lot of results and on all three search engines the top 4 had at least 2 links to the official website, unlike when I search Drake Tour 2012 which even though it also had a lot of results, his official website didn't come up until the third page on Google and I couldn't even find it on Bing or yahoo.  Judging by this analysis it’s far easier to find information on The Country living show rather than Drakes tour which had many results leading to phoney websites. After comparing the three different search engines I think now that Bing is a better option for searching, it come out on top with the number of results and its I think the top results were the most relevant. Now for the two website, they are both very different the country living is colourful with lots of pictures whereas Drakes is very sleek and clean. They both have links around the home page the country living has them all around the front page whereas drake has them just in a column but either way they were both easy to view and use. The links used on the websites were different on Drakes he has more links to social networking sites whereas country living has links to the ticket office and all the other various thing that will be at the fair. You can only register on the country living spring fair website and not on Drakes page I think this is because most news and important information is told via social networking.  Both websites are different but both easy to use and you can find your way around them quickly. I personally like the drake one better as I like to be in the know and like keeping up with and event via Facebook and twitter but if I was a customer going to Country Living Fair then I would have no problem using the website. In terms of what is really better out of the two I would say the Country Living fair its comes out on top when searched online so it’s always the number once source of information, unlike drake which is near on impossible to find. 


References 

Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Blog Trois- Website Comparison Nombre Un


Blog Number 3


Website Comparison

So my third post is going to be about my two chosen events websites. I am going to focus on two points, the first being where the event official page is positioned on three different search engines, and then the next I will be looking on the actual website and having a look at the page.

Just thought i would include a little website definition.  


If a website is designed correctly and in a good way it can play a big part in the way the customer interprets your website. It could also have an effect of ticket sales for the event.

So I am first going to find the position of Country Living Spring fair on three search engines, the first being Google, then search it on Bing then lastly Yahoo. The reason for choosing these three is that these are the top three search engines with Google having a massive 900,000,000 monthly visits.
I started by typing ‘Country Living Spring Fair’ Google took 0.15 seconds to find 3,160,000 results, with the top two results being the Official Websites.  The amount of results is high but most of these pages probably have nothing to do with the event they will be about the magazine itself.

Next I went onto Bing and searched the same ‘country living spring fair’ Bing found 74,900,000 results but it doesn't show how long it took to search it. You can already notice one difference between Google and Bing in that Bing found a whopping 71,000,000 more results. Unlike Google, Bing top three results were all links to the Country Living website.
Lastly Yahoo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIPmS4Pb0ww&feature=related) so like before I done the same search, this time with a result of 96,400,000 but with only the top two results linking to the main website. Unlike Google and Bing yahoo has a sponsored result on the top, this sponsored result take you to ask.com and automatically searches ‘Country Living Fair’ in ask.com

I Just out of curiosity I thought I would have a little look around to see if I could find a graph or survey that shows who and what people actually click on  one they have searched on a search engine.

This image is an old image from the end of 2006 but it does give a rough guide to what activity goes on. As you can see the most popular areas clicked on are the top three links with very few people going to the
bottom of the page or so the side sponsors. This is helpful for Country Living Spring Fair as they are top two
on all three search engines.







So next I am going have a look at the website, http://www.countrylivingfair.com/spring/.
So you lot can see what im seeing here is a screen shot


The website is nice and easy to read it’s not to cluttered and you can easily find your way round it, tit stays with the spring fair theme with pastel colours and uses a basket pattern in the background. The website main picture has a little paragraph about a brief over view of what the Spring Fair is, there are links all around the home page that take you to the necessary pages such as buy tickets or to see the exhibition list. The home page has mini two slide shows which flip through different images which you can click on to be redirected. One of the slides shows being the sponsor’s three pictures scrolling across in the bottom right corner. The main three sponsors are Ecover, Windsmoor and Rituals cosmetics. The opening times are nice and clear in the top right corner.


I will be looking at these same point but for Drake next….. see you soon.

Refence

Thursday, 12 January 2012

Blog Deux- Target Market

Blog Number 2


Target Market

So I have had these written up for ages and I have finally got round to posting these next three post’s.
So… this is my second post and in this I am going to identify the target markets for both of the chosen events. Before I even start researching I know that both of the events have completely different target audiences this is because one is a live music tour and the other is an annual fair.
A target market is a group of customers that a business has chosen to aim its marketing to. If a business has a well-defined target market this will ultimately mean that they can market to their audience correctly and in an efficient way.


Country living fair
‘The Country Living Magazine Fairs deliver a unique audience of affluent women who love to shop’
The County Living Spring Fair is an annual fair held each year its average visitors are Art & Antique Professionals, Cultural Foundations, Craftsmen, Artisans, promoters & General Public are the target audience

This from an online Country Living Fair broacher it shows the exact breakdown of their key visitors. It’s an extremely high percentage of females that attend. The Country Living Fairs focuses around the magazine Country Living which has been around since 1978.  According to Mintel Over seven out of ten UK adults currently read magazines. In general, readers of magazines overall are somewhat more likely to be female than male, and are ABC1s than C2DEs. Six in ten women read women’s magazines. 21% read woman’s general-interest magazines.
Description: http://www.at40.com/cimages/var/plain_site/storage/images/repository/photos/drake-at-axe-lounge-miami-beach-wide-audience-shot-from-stage/54365-1-eng-US/Drake-at-Axe-Lounge-Miami-Beach-Wide-Audience-Shot-from-Stage_photo_medium.jpg

Drake
After researching for a while trying to find target markets for Drake I didn’t come up on anything so I decided to look into the target audience for his genre on music. Drake is and R&B and Hip Hop singer so I researched into the types of audience who are influenced by this style of music. R & B and Hip Hop are the pop (i.e. popular music) of today. Like all pop music from the 1950's until now, it’s aimed to the age group of 16-25 year. It's aimed at black and white audiences of both genders, unlike before because the corporates want to maximise revenue so they need to appeal as large an audience as possible. According to Mintel 15% of adults had gone to a pop festival in the last 12 months.
Looking through forums to see who listens to Drake music more males or female, it come to my surprise that it’s more females (16-30)that listen to his music. The way he sings about his relationships and life is in a way females really relate.
From my research I know that these two events have completely different target markets. Though they differ in most ways they actually both target female just of different age groups. For country living to market their audience they are better to market in magazines and through websites popular with women of that age. In Drake case going through social networks (Facebook, twitter) is a better way to relate to his market, also what drake also did was before the tickets come on sale his new album come on sale, meaning he has a lot of coverage around that time.





References



Wednesday, 4 January 2012

Blog Un-My Deux Events




Bonjour 

So here its goes my first ever blog (scary) thankfully for me and possibly the readers my blog won’t be on my opinions this blog is merely going to be used to keep track of the marketing communications of two up and coming events in march 2012. 

Seeing as I just about passed English in GCSE please don’t expect big fancy words!

Anyway to get to the point, the reason I’m going to be writing on this blog will be because i am looking at the marketing and promotion of two events. I will compare the two different events and how their techniques may differ to attract the different target audience.

Event 1.
My first event is the Country Living Spring Fair held between the 21 to the 25 March 2012 at the Business Design Centre, Islington in London.
‘The Country Living Spring Fair is the perfect place to stock up on new and inspiring ideas for your home and garden. Once again, The Business Design Centre in London’s Islington, will be host to over 400 independent designers, small producers and craftspeople from across the British Isles many of them exhibiting for the first time. Treat yourself to a whole new look from the unique jewellery and fashions collections, sample delicious regional fare in the Food Hall and discover furniture, fabrics and accessories to add country style to your home.’
Ticket are bought online
Ticket PricesAdvanceDoor
Adult£12.50£16.00
Country Living subscriber£11.50£16.00
Gala Evening£12.50£14.00
Gala & Sunday shop£16.50£18.00
OAPn/a£12.50
Child 5 - 16£7.00£8.50
Under 5'sFreeFree

The reason I have chosen to follow this event is because I know a little bit about the magazine as my mum always buys it so I have a bit of a back ground on it, and I was interested as to how they promote the event to their target market who are home owners ages 35+.

Event 2
For my second event I am going to be following two of the dates from Drake’s UK tour  these are Monday, 26 March 2012 and Tuesday the 27th March 2012 both at the 02 arena in London. On November 15, 2011 drake released his recent album ‘Take Care’ a month prior to when tickets went on sale. Prices for tickets started at around £37.50.
 ‘Drake has announced plans for a nine date arena tour of the UK next year.





Taking place in March and April 2012, the Canadian hip hop artist will kick off the run of shows at London O2 Arena on March 26, finishing up at Nottingham Capital FM Arena on April 25. Tickets go on sale Friday December 16 at 9am.'


My reason for choosing this event was because I wanted to compare two completely different types of events which are targeted to two different audiences, also I wanted to see if a big named artist needed the help of the venue to help promote or whether they promote themselves.
In my next blog I will look into the marketing techniques used by my events. I will also be look into their target groups and how the promote the events to them. 


References