مکالمه

BEC : Marketing - Conversation

AJ: All right, next is one of my favorite topics, actually, marketing. Marketing is, of course, a part of every single business. Marketing really is just about getting your message out to the public, out to people, whatever it is. Advertising is part of marketing, but public relations can be part of marketing. A lot of different things can get put under that idea of marketing.

The really basic idea of marketing is just that you’re communicating your message --the company’s message --out to the rest of the world basically for the purpose of attracting more customers. So that’s the nuts and bolts of it. That’s it.

There are a whole lot of ways of doing that. Branding, you heard the term ‘branding’ or ‘to brand’ or ‘a brand’. It can be a verb or a noun. That’s a common one, especially in bigger companies. That’s really about kind of creating an image in the world, an idea out in the world of what is unique or special about either a certain product or a whole company so that when people think of your company they think of certain things, ideally, the things you want them to think of.

For example: Apple Computer. Apple has a brand and the Apple Computer brand is about creativity and innovation and people who are different, kind of not normal and they’ve developed that. They’ve very consciously communicated that again and again in their advertisement, in the design of their products, in their speeches. In all of their marketing, in other words, they really focus on building that kind of brand.

George: Yeah. That’s an important aspect of any company, particularly your large companies and it works in a lot of ways. Sometimes it’s just the name --as AJ said like Apple --that projects an image or a thought process in people’s mind. Sometimes it’s a logo that is associated. This is usually with maybe older, longer-established companies, but there are certain logos, pictures that you see and you identify. Example: the golden arches. Think about the golden arches on a fast-food restaurant, who is that? McDonald’s.

Another aspect of that are just the words that go with certain companies that are a part of their branding. Big Mac - Well, everybody knows a Big Mac comes from McDonald’s. It doesn’t come from Burger King or Wendy’s.

Wendy’s, there’s another one, the picture of Wendy herself, Dave’s daughter where this whole thing was started.

So there are phrases, pictures and images, it’s part of a marketing program to get the general public or at least the buying public --the folks that the company want to buy something --to identify and be comfortable with. It’s either knowing that this company is reliable because they’ve been around a long time, knowing that this company has good prices.

Walmart, for example, everybody can identify that as lower prices. IBM is another example. What do you think of as IBM? Well, you think of computers, really big computers; General Electric, Johnson and Johnson the drug company. So it’s a way of becoming known without having to give your long message and your long advertising. The brand is there and over time everybody knows what stands behind that brand or behind that company.

AJ: Yeah. I think, again, this idea that marketing is really communication. Another way to say it would be propaganda. It’s the same idea. You know these images are carefully chosen. These brands, these ideas, the lifestyle, the values, all of that is very carefully chosen. So when you’re watching an ad for a certain company their sending all kinds of messages.

At the large corporation level if you notice on television most of the ads are not very direct. If they’re beer commercials they show guys partying and surrounded by beautiful women. So their whole brand and image is about fun, having a great time and being a desirable guy. They craft all these emotions and they’re trying to connect. What it really boils down to with marketing is they’re trying to connect certain emotions and values to their product or their company.

Then, of course, how do they choose which ones? Well, they’re choosing the ones they think will attract people to buy. Beer companies know that men drink most of the beer so they’re creating a brand that focuses on men. A different company that’s focusing on women or younger women might choose a very different approach. So that’s a certain kind of marketing -brand marketing --and it tends to be large corporations that do that.

Within marketing there’s a very important subset called advertising.

Advertising is a big one. A lot of companies have a huge ad spend. They spend thousands or even millions of dollars on advertising and, again, it’s to get that message out. So advertising is part of marketing, it’s not the whole thing.

George: No, it’s not the whole thing, but it’s usually a very, very big part. If you look at the expense budgets of some of your large corporations, 20% of that budget is advertising or marketing-type programs.

Advertising is very unique and manipulative sometimes. For example, AJ mentioned the beer commercials with the guys and the girls and the partying.

That’s one kind. Then there are the beer commercials of the guys and the girls partying out at the stockcar races or the big Indianapolis-type of car races. My point here is that the advertising, particularly for large companies, gets very specific and hones in. It’s called target marketing. They’re advertising to a specific group. Let me give you an example.

If you watch TV very often, right before the dinner hour, usually, you’re going to see a lot of ads --advertising --from companies that sell food; pizza, chicken, McDonald’s-type places. As you get later in the evening right after the dinner hour, there’s a lot of advertising that you see about children’s things. Not directed at the children, but things that parents probably would want to buy or do with their children. You get late, late, late at night, I’m talking 10:00-11:00-12:00 o’clock, guess what? There are a lot of ads that are directed at old folks, retirees, all kinds of ads about gadgets and pills and drugs and vacation spots that are for older folks.

Advertising is a fascinating piece of marketing to look at and if you sit back and look at an ad and I don’t care whether it’s a television ad or a written ad or a radio add or anything, even a big billboard, take note. Take a look at it and see if you can figure out, and I bet you can very quickly, who’s the target.

Who are they trying to attract here.

AJ: Public relations is another key aspect of marketing, you know getting that message out. You might be surprised to know that a huge number of the articles and “news stories” that you see in newspapers and online and television are actually written by or created by companies, large corporations, a gigantic number. So you think you’re getting objective news, but what you’re actually getting is public relations; something written by a company to promote their point of view.

Public relations is very powerful because when people see an advertisement they see it different because they know it’s being paid for, they know they’re trying to sell, so when they watch a news story or they read something in the newspaper they tend to think that it’s more objective. That’s why it’s more valuable for a company to be able to get some kind of news story that maybe mentions them a little bit or even just mentions their field a little bit.

It’s a great way for them to promote themselves and they do it constantly. I used to be a journalist for a short time and, yeah, large, large, large amounts.

Journalists don’t actually write that much stuff. They get a lot of press releases from companies and groups and then they take those and they might rewrite them a bit. It happens a lot. So, public relations is another key part of marketing. Again, marketing is all about getting the company’s message out and attracting people.

George: Sure, and a lot of times as AJ says the opportunity for the public relations director to get a spot on a TV show or maybe even in the newspaper. The way the big companies certainly do it a lot is let’s say there’s some kind of an issue with food or something, what’s in it, all this trans fat stuff and things like that. Well, companies will let the public relations group put together a statement, if you will, showing how their company is supporting this issue that’s troubling the public.

As an example, I think McDonald’s might have been one of the first and then there were several others that followed with all of this business in the United States about trans-fats and how terrible they were. Don’t ask me what they are because I don’t have the slightest idea, but it has something to do with the oil that they’re cooking things in. Right off the bat, McDonald’s came right out and said oh, we’ve reduced our trans-fats or we don’t cook our French fries in trans fats anymore. We think this is a good idea. It’s good for the health of the country and so on and so forth.

Well, that was an advertisement, basically, but it was plugged in to all the newscasts on the radio, the television and the newspaper. So, in effect, they got a lot of free advertising just by supporting a public awareness program that happened to be out there at the time.

AJ: That’s kind of the basic overview of marketing. Of course, there are a lot of subsets of marketing. Even within advertising there’s direct marketing, which is where you’re really sending things directly to prospects, to possible customers. There’s mass marketing. Mass marketing is where you’re advertising kind of just trying to reach lots and lots and lots of people. A lot of television advertising is considered mass marketing. There’s online marketing now, which is growing and becoming quite huge.

So there are all kinds of little subsets of advertising and marketing, but all of them really involve just trying to reach out to people who may not know about the company or maybe they know about them and they need to be convinced to buy or to think positively about the company.

So that’s really the overview of marketing and we’ll talk more in the commentaries about more specific things.

The End.