Charity Adverts and Gender Differences

Promoting a charity is a much more complex process than promoting a product, service or brand. Charities are often dealing with taboo areas of society, circumstances that audiences don't really want to read about, and the charities cannot be accused of glamourising their subjects. Charity advertising is an innovative and creative field. Charities and ad agencies work hard within the restrictions imposed upon them to create ads that will provoke discussion as well as donation.





Provocative advertising is one way of getting a charity into the news.

During Friday's lecture we saw 3 adverts. For me, the first two were really good.
First- A girl looking at me with her sad, blue eyes...asking for help.
The second one- People from different generations saying: "I shoudn't be here." And suddenly, a woman trying on a wedding dress... She turns around and says with tears in her eyes: "My mom should be here..."
They would encourage me to give some money to these organisations.
Unfortunately, charities need to be shocking in order to provoke a response.




And about gender differences...I've read that "female brains are more compact than male brains, though smaller, they are more densely packed with neurons, particularly in the region responsible for language. Also, females have language functions evenly distributed in both cerebral hemispheres, while in males they are more concentrated in the left hemisphere. This puts males more at risk for language disorders like dyslexia." In other words, women are more intelligent :) They are more successful at school.



What's more, there are also gender differences in advertising. Women focus on health and beauty whilst men focus on phisical strength.

Enterprise Week: Advertising's role in a more complex world

Tom Vic, Group Business Director of leading communications agency JWT, was talking about advertising as an important element of the marketing communications mix during The Enterprise Week.



He mentioned that marketing is evolving through digital and adapting to the new times. First adverts people could admire in the press, then on the Radio, on TV and in the Internet. For example, D.E.P.s (digital escalator panels) are a revolution in digital screen advertising and feature across the Tube network.



Although it is very expensive, it is an investment for the future because Media, as told Tom Vic, are the second brand of marketing communications. It appears that an agency should go back to basics and adapt to the times. Full-service agencies are now very important but only the strongest will survive. In five years time we would have probably digital agencies. Vic consider that the credit crunch is an opportunity to make greater focus on cost-efficiency. He added that advertisements will always exist and develop all the time. Now is a time of great excitement and opportunity for the advertising industry.

Enterprise week: Divine Chocolate Story - Pa Pa Paa!

First of all, watch this short film wchich I found in the Internet. It explains a lot!


Divine Chocolate Limited is a manufacturer of Fairtrade chocolate products in the United Kingdom and the United States. It is the first farmer owned chocolate company. It was established in the UK in 1998 as a partnership between the Kuapa Kokoo cocoa growers' collective and the alternative trading organization Twin Trading.
Its first product, launched in October 1998, was Divine milk chocolate.


"There are currently around 1.6 million people involved in growing cocoa and many more in associated industries"



Divine Chocolate Ltd is owned by the following organizations:
•45% owned by Kuapa Kokoo, a Fairtrade cocoa cooperative in Ghana.
•43% shares are owned by Twin Trading.
•12% are owned by Oikocredit, a Dutch microfinance institution.

Divine is decorated with traditional West African Adinkra symbols which appear on crafts and fabrics all over Ghana.



Pa Pa Paa - The Best of the Best!
Cocoa from Ghana is of a high quality and trades at a premium on the world market. Kuapa Kokoo's motto is pa pa paa - which means the best of the best in the local Twi language.



Divine Chocolate gained many awards. Here are some of them:

Enterprise week: "Good Ideas Need Protection"

It is a title of today's lecture. Silas Brown, a solicitor, was talking about protecting our intellectual property rights. He began with a dictionary definition: "rights in property that result from original creative thoughts, as patents, copyright material, and trade marks..."



These are all my notes:

Copyright works:
-Original works: literary, dramatic, musical
-Derivative works: sound, recordings, films
-Other: typographical arrangements

Owner rights:
-Exclusive right to "licence" the copyright
-Exclusive property rights to re-use, copy etc.
-Lasts 70 years after death of author

Design rights relates to change from the idea to phisical thing, e.g. a chair. They are divided into registered and unregistered.



Owner rights:
-Exclusive property rights to produce articles,
-Exclusive right to "licence" the unregistered design
-Unregistered: Lasts 10 years from date of marketing
-Registered: Up to max25 years, renewed every 5 years

Unregistered:
-Original functional designs
-Whole articles or parts of articles
-Exemptions: surface decoration, methods/principles of constructions

Registered:
-Designs relating to appearance or ornamentation

Criteria for what can be registered:
-Must be new
-Must have individual character

Register design lasts longer than unregistered!

Patetnts - pure inventions

Criteria:
-Novelty- inventive step
-Capable of industrial application

Rights:
-Exclusive right to make, sell and licence the invention

Trade marks (e.g. Parker Knoll, BANG&OLUFSEN)- anything that can be represented graphically. They're also divided into registered and unregistered.

Registration:
-Classification of goods/services
-Territorial

Licence Agreements - key areas:
-Value of the design
-Quality of reproduction: reputation/goodwill
-Licence fees/Royalty rates

Finally, Silas Brown advised us to identify and protect our IP!

Advertising/Gender Differences

I’m sorry that I didn’t write this post earlier because I was in Poland, but better late than never :)
Last week, we were talking about gender differences. It's really interesting!
We were watching some adverts and tried to remember as many as it was possible. As it turned out, the most recognizable averts were: Nissan, Beyonce fragrance, Nike, Gillette, Paco Rabanne and Lacoste. However, boys memorized shoes, car or beer adverts whilst girls rather fragrance adverts.



The reason why we chose these adverts is that we often pay attention to:

* words in the middle of the picture
* shining/contrast colours
(women show a distinct preference for more color and graphics)
* celebrities
* atmosphere of happiness and fun
* pale pink as a background (it is typical for girls)
* animals


We noticed that some adverts are too dark or they have nothing in the middle, e.g. SLATE advert.


"The human brain, like the human body, is sexed, and differences in the sex-specific human brain condition a wide range of behaviors that we typically associate with maleness or femaleness."(Robert Nadeau, 1997)



As I read in the article which Ruth gave us last lesson, there are two specific effects: primacy and recency. Females exhibit more primacy effects whilst males exhibit more recency effects. It means that women memorize, for example, advertisements which are placed at the beginning of the newspaper and men inversely. Understanding how persuasion occurs across gender lines is very important for advertising agencies.

Finally, some stereotypes:)

According to Niedenthal et al.:

* Women are more emotionally expressive.
* Women are more emotionally responsive.
* Women are more empathetic.
* Women are more sensitive to others' feelings.
* Women are more obsessed with having children.
* Women express their feelings without constraint, except for the emotion of anger.
* Women pay more attention to body language.
* Women better judge emotions from nonverbal communication.
* Women express more love, fear, and sadness.
* Women laugh, gaze, and smile more.
* Women anticipate negative consequences for expressing anger and aggression.
* Men are overwhelmed by women's expressions of emotion.
* Men express more anger.
* Men control their feelings.
* Men restrain from expressing their feelings.
* Men are stoic.
* Men show emotion to communicate dominance.



If you would like to read about gender differences read this article: http://www.narth.com/docs/york.html

Personality

"Personality can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations"(Ryckman, 2004). The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask.
The pioneering American psychologist, Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality, the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization, or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual.

We were doing very funny test. Ruth asked us to draw a pig. Everything depended on where we placed our pig, how big ears it had, how many legs etc. I found out that I'm friendly, optimistic and emotional person who remember about important dates :)

"Freud divides human personality into three significant components: the ego, superego, and id. The id acts according to the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification of its needs regardless of external environment; the ego then must emerge in order to realistically meet the wishes and demands of the id in accordance with the outside world, adhering to the reality principle. Finally, the superego inculcates moral judgment and societal rules upon the ego, thus forcing the demands of the id to be met not only realistically but morally. The superego is the last function of the personality to develop, and is the embodiment of parental/social ideals established during childhood. According to Freud, personality is based on the dynamic interactions of these three components."

We were talking about self-concept during last lecture as well.



Self-concept describes how we see ourselves in the world. For example, people who suffer from bulimia think that they're too fat. Our self concept is shaped by our experiences. What can raise our self-concept is successful experience such as doing well on a test :)

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of being." Goethe

We were talking about a brand personality as well (sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness).
We had to think about Porsche and iPod "personality".
These are results:

Segmentation

"To get a product or service to the right person or company, a marketer would firstly segment the market, then target a single segment or series of segments, and finally position within the segment(s).

Segmentation is essentially the identification of subsets of buyers within a market who share similar needs and who demonstrate similar buyer behavior. The world is made up from billions of buyers with their own sets of needs and behavior. Segmentation aims to match groups of purchasers with the same set of needs and buyer behavior. Such a group is known as a segment."(Marketing Teacher, 2000)



The diagram above depicts how segmentation information is often represented as a pie chart diagram - the segments are often named and/ or numbered in some way.

We're doing a lot of experiments during Friday's lesson.
First of all, Ruth asked us to classify some figure (I can't add a photo of them because it's impossible to get to the blackboard). Anyway, there are many ways to do it. The only thing we need is an idea. Lois won this competition :) She had the most solutions.
Then, we had to think how many different shampoons we can find in shops, e.g. shampoons for: black hair, blond hair, red hair, brown hair, grey hair, long hair, short hair, curly hair, wavy hair, flat hair, greasy hair, dyed hair, bob hair, stubble hair... and many, many more. Marketers make us believe that men's hair differ from women's in order to earn more money. If there were only one product called 'shampoo', we wouldn't have neither competitions between companies nor advertisements.
Later, we were thinking about toothpastes and washing powders. I couldn't believe when Ruth said that there are only two companies which produce washing powders! It's amazing.
The last task was to read a receipt from Tesco and try to guess what kind of person was doing shopping there. It was very funny because we were drawing pictures as well. Here are some photos :)








As you can see, my group created a picture of a single, middle-aged, business-woman, on a diet and without children. Unfortunately, we were not wright, but it was really interesting experience.

If you want to read something interesting about segmentation, look at these websites:
http://www.marketingteacher.com/Lessons/lesson_segmentation.htm
http://www.businessplans.org/Segment.html

Perception Experiments

During Friday's lesson we were doing some strange but really interesting experiments. We had an opportunity to taste different chocolates and drinks, look at some pictures and finally smell some perfumes and shampoons. The conclusions were totally surprising. As it turned out, most of us prefer to drink Pepsi than Coke. However, we thought that Pepsi is Coke. Even though this experiment was done many times, the results are always the same!
The other experiment I find very interesting was the one with chocolates. We were tasting 3 chocolate brads: Galaxy, Dairy milk and Tesco. Most people consider that Galaxy is the best one. The cheapest one, Tesco chocolate, was really awful.

I was doing my experiment with Magda. We tooke 8 different shampoons and ask 5 people to smell and touch them. They had to have their eyes closed, of course. We noticed that the most recognizable brand is Dove. It is the most expensive one as well.

When Rafał smelt the cheapest shampoon, he told: "It smells like a hospital!"
In my opinion, Dove has the best advertisements as well. Especially one is very interesting and catchy. You can check:
I read about perception in the Internet and I found some important and interesting quotations:

"It has been estimated that the average consumer is exposed to from 300 to 600 advertisements in a normal day." (Assael 1981)

"Consumers perceive marketing stimuli selectively because each individual is unique in the combination of his or her needs, attitudes, experiences, and personal characteristics. Selective perception means that the identical advertisement, package, or product may be perceived very differently by the two consumers." (Assael 1981)

"Selective perception ensures that consumers will receive information most relevant to their needs and to brand evaluation. This process is referred to as perceptual vigilance." (Assael 1981)

"As consumers are exposed to hundreds of ads in a single day, they must be selective in screening out information. Such a filtering process becomes particularly important in low involvement decision-making. In these circumstances, the time spent on information processing is very low. The consumer will pay attention only to exceptional information such as change in price or brand features or the introduction of a new brand. Information processing occurs, therefore, by exception. Little attention will be paid to frequently repeated and expected stimuli. Attention is only devoted to unexpected stimuli." (Assael 1981) Attracting attention in advertising is the most important factor when creating awareness to consumers! Taht is why we can watch or read so many different advertisements.

"Advertisements are designed to communicate effectively with the consumer. This is done by appealing to the right brain by using words, symbols, and illustration that are meaningful, familiar, and attractive to people." (Pride et al., 1998).

Take a look on this adverts, they're really good!

Perception

In today’s world we are all surrounded by wide range of colours, sounds and odours. Wherever we are, we can see different advertisements which influence our perception.

And what means ‘perception’? We can explain it as a particular way of looking at or understanding something. In our hand- book, ‘Consumer Behaviour’ , I read that ‘perception is the process by which stimuli are selected, organized and interpreted.’

Perception is a part of advertising. It is very important for particular brands to persuade potential customers to purchase a product or to consume a service. That is why we are bombarded by different types of advertisements on TV. Some of them are funny, other controversial but most of them are really catchy.



According to some articles: "What one perceives is a result of interplays between past experiences, one’s culture and the interpretation of the perceived. If the percept does not have support in any of these perceptual bases it is unlikely to rise above perceptual threshold."

A lot of information reaches the eye, but much is lost by the time it reaches the brain (about 90% is lost). Therefore, the brain has to guess what a person sees based on past experiences. We actively construct our perception of reality.

Our perceptions of the world are hypotheses based on past experiences and stored information.

We are exposed to so many advertisements, that it is sometimes difficult to decide for only one product! We should try to select things which are really necessary, otherwise we will always spend more money than we should.

Interesting article about Perception:
http://www.simplypsychology.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/perception-theories.html