Either develop your own promotional campaign for the project or discuss an existing campaign in detail that meets the following criteria. Please do not use an example from the Discussion section of the course.
1) Choose a product or service that your campaign will be for. Pick something that interests you and come up with a slogan. Without a slogan, you do not have a campaign. Your slogan should be the title of your paper.
2) If the product already exists, you will need to include information as to how your campaign is different than any existing campaign. Do this by researching how the company currently promotes their products. Include the full URL’s with the information that you find by citing your sources in your bibliography and citing them in the body of your paper, like this .
If the product/service is brand new because this is an idea for your own business, you should provide a little background of your idea and explain the need for your product/service.
3) A successful campaign should have a “big idea,” be executed using integrated marketing communications (IMC), and involve the consumer as a participant.
A “big idea” is a container that holds everything in place. There are essentially four “big ideas:” (1) A contest, (2) staging an event, (3) “doing good” – having a cause, or (4) telling stories (where the stories involve the customers of the product/service). A big idea can include more than one of these four points – but it must have at least one.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is where the promotional tools that are used tie back with each other in order to reinforce each other. For example, when Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all link to each other in communicating a campaign. The common mention of a campaign slogan serves as a unifier.
In today’s world, people are constantly using social media with their phones. Marketers often get consumers to respond through social media and participate with a company’s promotion. Positive feedback can provide a company with valuable favorable word of mouth. This can also lead to repeat sales. However, positive feedback is earned. It cannot be easily manipulated. You won’t say anything good about a product that you don’t actually like.
4) Ultimately, the success of any campaign has more to do with simply a clever idea. It has to do with how well the clever idea is executed. Also, it is not feasible to create “fake” social media accounts simply to do a project.
5) The discussion/participation section to the course contains key materials for your project.
Campaign Slogan (This is the title of your paper)
Introduction
Explain why you chose your topic. What is it about the company and product/service that interests you? Where did the idea for the campaign come from?
Company Background and Values
Provide a brief background of the company and discuss the company’s values. What is the company’s “why?” (purpose) or “just cause?”
Segmentation of the Market and Identifying Target Customers
Who is the campaign trying to reach? Who are the customers? How is the market segmented? Which customers is the campaign targeting? (This material is in chapter four, and here is a brief video). You can also “google” your product topic to see what you can find about the segmentation of your product category. I.e., “how is the car market segmented?”
The Campaign’s “Big Idea”
A “big idea” is a container that holds everything in place. There are essentially four “big ideas:” (1) A contest, (2) staging an event, (3) “doing good” – having a cause, or (4) telling stories (where the stories involve the customers of the product/service). A big idea can include more than one of these four points – but it must have at least one. What is the big idea of your campaign? Here is a helpful video.
Promotional Tools
Which promotional tools is the campaign using? Here is a partial list: website, social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.), traditional media (TV/cable, billboard, radio, newspaper, magazine, etc.). If you are designing your own campaign with limited funds, a website and a few social media tools would be ideal. There are a number of videos in the discussion section that go over the use of social media tools as they are used with promotion.
Integrated Marketing Communication
How are the promotional tools being used with the campaign work together? How are they linked? If you are doing a paper on an existing campaign, try to include screen captures from the company’s social media accounts in order to illustrate this. If you are designing your own campaign, provide a diagram with arrows and a brief explanation. Here is a helpful video.
Consumer Participation
How do you plan to involve your customers to participate in your promotion? Here are two sets of videos (one and two) from the discussion section of the course and the Nike example.
Building the Brand
How does your campaign help build the company’s (your) brand? Summarize the execution of your campaign. You might find this video helpful. It all comes back to the evolution of Marketing and trying to appeal to the consumer’s heart, mind, and spirit. This is the essence of Marketing 3.0. And, here is the example with Coca Cola.
Campaign Execution
Explain what elements of your campaign will be the most difficult to carry out. In other words, what does the success of your campaign hinge upon? For example, if I were promoting a college through the success stories of the school’s students, I would have to build a library of stories and also get alumni to be willing to participate. If the students had not been contacted for years, they might not want to share their stories.
Conclusion
What did you learn from this exercise? Is this something that you think you could execute for someone that hired you? Provide a brief summary here.
Please use the provided sub-headings in your paper so that I can follow your campaign more easily.
