The 15th - Final Blog

Reflective summary of the Blogs

The blogs were an excellent opportunity to learn about marketing in a different way rather than writing a report on it. “A blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.
In simple terms, a blog is a website, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis.” (Blogger.com 2010)

I would more than likely use the blogs tool again.
The tool which was used for this blog was blogger.com. It is very good and simple to understand. The best thing about blogs is that they are personal to the person and they help get my personal point of view across.

I actually did not know that businesses also use blogs for their business. I may use the blogs designed by the businesses to find out information about the blogs.
Blogs are a very good way for businesses to make their products popular and they help promote the business. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones being created every day. This shows they are very popular. These are the businesses that use blogs in their business to promote. Marketers also use blogs to advertise their products and give information on the latest deals the business is doing.
• General Motors - Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz launched his own ‘FastLane’ Blog. The blog helps clear up the bad press the business may get in the future. It also helps the business promote their latest products and give links to reviews of their products.
• Amazon – They use blogs to let their customers get involved in discussions about the latest developments and what the new things they are looking to do with the website.
• Google – has a small area where people can post their views about the business and they may also give feedback to Google about their business. It is a more interactive blog, with polls conducted about the website.


Blogs are increasing rapidly and many businesses are using blogs to catch up with the Internet age. Many people now have Internet and blogs are a very good way of meeting the target audience. Many people don’t like to read a lot but blogs can be about everything. They can be just videos used for viral marketing campaigns or information blogs, giving details about the company’s products. So this is why they are increasing so fast.
Blogs were also a very good at improving IT skills and a person with very low IT skills can use them. The most important things about blogs is that they are personal and the person can visit them as much as they like. They are also interesting and they will help the reader as well as the writer learn. Some people like to use videos as their learning tool and blogs consist of good videos which illustrate examples given. Some people may hate reading from books and learning so these blogs summarised the content in the books and involved theory as well as interesting examples.
The strengths in the process were:
• The blog is personal and after the lecture the student will go home and blog about the topics covered
• Many students just go to the lecture and then forget about it, the blogs are a very good chance for them to revise this and then learn better from them
The weaknesses may be:
• The blogs can be repetitive work and many people will not concentrate on them as much
• Some of the topics are boring and not easy to discuss

The blogs helped to get the personal point across so they were a good experience. Many things were learnt from it and if given another task it would be great if it involved a bit of blogging. Many people at first did not even know what a blog is so they were stuck at the start but when they got started, it was easier. Thinking of blogs being interesting, many people may actually start a blog on a subject they find interesting.
Overall I enjoyed the blogging assignment and I would do it again! It helped me in many ways and helped me to learn about the subject in a better way. They were time consuming but they were also a goo learning tool.

I have also learnt that you can make money from blogs! This is a good discovery and for those of you who want to know how, check out this video:

THANKS VERY MUCH for your interest in my blog!

The 14th - Generational marketing

Generational marketing is 'the method of marketing to a specific generation is affecting the way that we promote and sell products and services. We are all a product of our generation. Each generation have their own characteristics, because of this as a marketing target we can usually categorize by generations by the way that we act and speak as well as our belief systems.'



There are four different generations advertisers market to:
1.Millenials or Generation 2001ers, born after 1980 - Millennials are from the age group of 7 to 27 years old. This group is basically young children to young adults. They have grown up in the technology and love their computers, iPods etc.
This advert I think is very good for the younger generation. Firstly its for a games console and a very popular game so this generation is familiar with this technology. Also the advert has humour and it is good at making people remember the advert.

2.Baby Busters or Generation Xers born between 1965 and 1980 - Generation X are between the age of 28 to 48 years. They have grown up through the 70s and through the financial boom of the technology bubble. This advert below is good, I think, for this generation, I think most men this age would have young children so this advert will be good for this generation.



3.Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 - These sound like they are babies but this generation is basically between the ages of 49 to 66. They have grown up through the 60s and have seen some of the greatest pop bands in their time.



4.Mature Citizens born between 1909 and 1945 - this is the oldest generation, these are over the age of 60. These are the people who have grown up through the Second World War, this is the only major event which happened in their young generation but they have lived through everything all the other generations are going through. So they are the most experienced and wiser in my opinion. So the best advert, for them I think would be the Hovis advert. It shows the last 122 years. I'm not saying they are that old but they have lived through and some have personally experienced some of the events.

The 13th - Perception Experiment

Product packaging

For the perception experiment in the lecture, our group decided to to a product packaging test for this. It was a good experiment because it helped see how packaging effects the buyers decisions.
The reason for doing this was to see if factors apart from taste really affect our purchase decisions when we buy something or whether it was other perceptions that influence the purchasing decisions These are the chocolates we decided on as a group.

The structure of the expeeriment was that we would show the people the packaging and imagine they had never ate the chocolates before, which one would they go for. This should show us which chocolates people choose based on just the packaging. For example if some one is buying a particular chocolate for the first time, what would attract that customer to buy that particular chocolate?
From the results, we saw that if they were buying the chocolates for the first time, they would buy the Divine. This they said is because the packaging looks very good and they woul want to buy it.
There was, however, one problem with the experiment, many of the people in the class had already ate the chocolates so there was a bias towards the certain chocolates.

Product packaging is very good at genmerating popularity for the product. If you stripped the label off a traditional bottle of Coca-Cola -the curvy, small container-everyone would still know what it was.

So product packaging is very important and marketers will ahve to design their packaging to fit their target audience. If the product is good and the packaging is rubbish, the product will not attract as much attention as it would have with eye catching one.

The 12th - Social Class

Social class is "a division of society made up of persons possessing certain common social characteristic which are taken to qualify them for intimate.." Krech (2000). This means that there are groups in society which are classed one above the other.

This diagram is not very clear but it basically shows how social class has changed from previous years to today. In the past, there were mainly three groups, the upper, middle and lower class. Now it is not that simple, there are also sub groups now and it is harder now to class people, as to which group the belong to.

Here is a video, which describes simply what social class is.



This video shows what is generally shown in families of the upper, middle and lower class. The lower class is usually stereotyped at having more children, marketers can use this to their advantage as they will be able to offer good deals for the family and extra discounts if they bring children. The husband and wife are usually not living together, so marketers will have to find ways of getting the families back together and this will get them to spend money on the marketers products. Generally the lower class do not have alot of money so they will look for value rather than quality.



This advert from Asda shows that every family will want to celebrate Christmas but not all have tonnes of money. Asda are offering cheaper alternative to high quality so this advert is targeting the lower class.



This Christmas advert from M And S is, I think, tageting the middle class. It does not involve price too much and it is a little more about quality then value. At one point it Wallace actully mentions 'lots of stuff delivered to your door', I think this is a good point to mention because middle class people like abit of luxury with their purchase and this would be a good example.



This advert from Harrods is a good examaple of what upper class people like. There are no prices mentioned in it and its alot about quality. Upper class people like their to be a lot of luxtury and quality.

The 11th - Marketing for Children

Marketing to children is a very good way of getting the children to nag the parents until they become so enraged that the only way to stop the children is to actually do what they want. Marketers use adverts which only target children, even though they may only have a few quid saved up under their mattress. But the reason is because as said in the previous blog, children are a very good way of getting the par tents to spend their money.
This is data from Mintel and it shows the facts and figures related to the children's market.

Toys 2008 Market size (2007) £2.2 Bn
Comics 2008 Market size (2007) £129M
OTC Kids Medicines (2009) £203M

Pocket Money 2008
The vast majority of children are not just reliant on a single source for their pocket money, but receive additional funds from other areas.

This data will be very useful to marketers because it shows how big the market is. The interesting fact is that majority of children actually get their pocket money from not just one place. The market for toys is at over £2 billion so it is a huge market in which marketers have to take advantage.
When it comes to advertising to children, I think the best adverts are TV adverts. This is because children tend to watch TV the most compared to magazines or newspapers.



This, I think, is excellent in getting children to force their parents to take them to Lego Land. The advert itself is not spectacular but the content is good. Which child would not want to be a hero? But not only is the advert meeting the needs of the children, it also has an incentive for the whole family, so it is cheaper if the whole family goes.
This advert is mainly targeted at male children, here is an advert which will be targeted at girls.



Marketers also use cartoon characters to influence young children, a cartoon is very likely to catch the attention of children.
If marketers can influence the children with a character from a TV show. Children will recal the charaters and then remember the adverts because of that. Marketers are also using the Internet for promoting. One website would be http://www.barbie.com/, they have got games, videos tec all to promote the barbie brand.