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Week 3

This week, we were required to read Chapter 9, "Touch Point Selection" and Chapter 10, "Getting Social" from Brand Media Strategy. Both of these chapters are very relevant to our campaign for the College of Business.

Chapter 9, "Touch Point Selection" deals with the different channels that can be used to reach consumers. The book stated "an important element of the Brand Media Strategy is integrating the brand communications across the different touch points in a way that best exploits the target consumer's relationship with each of the channels." The first step in a campaign is to consider all possible touch points. Then you must consider which touch points make the most sense with your message for the campaign. Different channels are used to obtain different goals.
Figure 9.2, shows how different channels effect promoting loyalty, driving traffic/ purchase intent, promotion consideration, generating familiarity, and creating awareness. For example, we can see that TV is the most influential in creating awareness. Figure 9.4 shows channels that are strong for certain points along the consumer pathway. This is also very helpful in determining, which channels to use. For our campaign, we would have to determine what step along the path is the most important because we are attempting to influence four different stages of the pathway. There are some channels that are useful for multiple stages, so these may be good options for us (ex. online display).


However, it is also important to try something outside the box every once in a while because all of your competitors will likely be looking at the same strategies as you. Something unique and unexpected will help cut through the clutter. When deciding which channels to use, a planner should consider data, consumer insights, and communication roles. This applies to the CoB campaign. We have already obtained our 5 key consumer insights and have begun analyzing data provided to us by the CoB. In addition, we have thought about the stages of the consumer pathway that are most important for the campaign. This will help us determine which channels to utilize. We can also use this strategy to explain to our client why we chose specific channels and persuade them effectively to select our team.

 Chapter 10, "Getting Social" is all about social media. Due to the increase in technology in recent year, social media has become extremely important. Social media allows companies to have direct conversations with their consumers and has also exponentially increased the reach and relevance of word of mouth. This has made it possible for brands to turn detractors into advocates by promptly responding to concerns that consumers voice on social media. Social is very influential in building active consideration and advocacy. This has relevance to our campaign because active consideration is one of the stages of the consumer pathway that we are trying to influence. In addition, advocacy seems to by very important at WNE. Many people hear about our school from past alumnus or current students, so advocacy is actually helping to spread awareness of the school. Social media could capitalize on this trend and make it even more relevant. One interesting statistic that the book stated was "consumers who choose to "follow" a brand on Twitter are 56 percent more likely to purchase it." This implies that students who follow the WNEU twitter would be more likely to attend the school. This means that we as a team and the school need to develop content that is helpful and interesting to the target market so that they will want to follow the account. Consumers use different social media platforms for different reasons. This means that although the general message you are attempting to portray will remain the same across all platforms, there should be unique and distinguishable tactics used for each platform. In addition, it is very beneficial when the content created appears organic. Consumers, especially younger consumers, have a keen eye for determining what is unimportant to them and they tend to ignore things that they deem to be ads. In the case of Facebook, the algorithms they use show users pages that they visit frequently or that they often interact with to improve their user experience. This means that pages have to persuade users to keep coming back by keeping them engaged or their messages will eventually stop showing up on that users feed. This chapter also talks about viral marketing, which is extremely effective, but very hard to create. These campaigns require little budget and have expansive reach. "The idea and the content rule here. In truth, there are incredibly hard to consistently deliver." Another idea that I agreed would be very effective was adaptive planning or piggybacking off of high profile events and buzz. This is something I have seen done by companies often. Today's Super Bowl and the enormous amount of advertisements and marketing efforts tied to the event is a perfect examples. Some companies even have planning and preparing response teams to react real time to such events. This is something that we may able to incorporate for the CoB campaign.

The final thing that I decided to discuss in this post is the article "What's The Big Idea: The 3 Fundamentals of a Successful Digital Creative." I read this article based on feedback from Professor Spotts in our team debrief from our client meeting. I hoped that this article would help my team refine our big idea. The article reinforced the importance of the big idea to the campaign. The article discussed three fundamental elements that are need to create a successful big idea. The first is a piercing insight. A piercing insight is one that is inspiring or aspiring and engages consumers because it is equivocal truth for them. This means that when it is expressed in a clear manner that consumers can understand, the insight can be easily retold by them and reiterated and shared amongst the target market. The second is a brand connection, which is formed by the brand solving, meeting, or exceeding the insight. The final component is succinct expression or "a one-line phrase that captures the insight and brand connection and can trigger recall of the brand moment for the consumer." We will consider these points and reanalyze our Big Idea. This may lead us to make some changes. 



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