This document analyzes the potential for Chicken of the Sea to use Jessica Simpson as a spokesperson. It discusses evaluating her appropriateness by considering if her public persona fits their brand image, if she appeals to their target demographic of women ages 25-54, and if they can effectively utilize her fame to advertise tuna. While she has pros like fame and an existing TV show, the document concludes the cons outweigh the pros. Specifically, her audience is mainly teens which doesn't match their demographic, and the high cost of TV ads with her would limit their advertising with a small budget.

1. CASE STUDY ANALYSIS
Integrated Marketing Communication II
Chicken of the Sea
Daniel Gundry, JesseBeukeboom, Kollan Gomes, Mike Lambert
Professor: SamPlati

2. Contents
IMC Tools: .....................................................................................................................................2
Jessica Simpson as a Spokesperson: ......................................................................................5
Pros ................................................................................................................................................6
Cons ...............................................................................................................................................6
Leverages......................................................................................................................................7
Final Thoughts ..............................................................................................................................8

3. IMC Tools:
Integrated marketing communication plays a crucial role when it comes to actually promoting a
company such as Chicken of the Sea International. When a company understands how to apply the
correct marketing tools effectively, it increases efficiency and overall success of business
survivability. With all IMC tools, the main message should concern how it ultimately benefits the
end-users. By successfully applying these tools, organizations can communicate with their clients
and reach a wider audience. Sales Promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and internet
communications are some of the most operative tools an organization can use to promote their
brand.
When we discuss sales promotion, we think coupons. Whether its discount coupons, membership
coupons, incentives, attractive packages for loyal customers, and special deals are few things, an
organization can use to promote their brand. In COSI’s case, they have already been successful
despite, the multiple buyouts and operation changes; their success heavily relied on them being
keeping the name “the Chicken of the Sea”. In recent years, top companies like COSI, Starkist,
and Bumble Bee shifted their promotional budgets to consumers and trade promotions and media
advertising has been minimal. COSI can take advantage of this situation as canned tuna has now
become a commodity and all the power has shifted to the consumers and private label brands.
Instead of just using newspapers, and cheap option media, COSI can use their famous mermaid
icon to promote effectively. By using incentives, coupons, and packages for loyal customers who
remain a member of the club, they can buy back the power from consumers and private label
brands to themselves. The easiest and most efficient way would be to mail in coupons like many

4. other organizations do, or use digital media to hand out coupons to their clients. Word-of-mouth
can be a powerful tool when it comes from loyal customers who are treated well by the
organization. COSI can leverage this by giving their loyal customers special incentives and bonus
offerings such as gift cards or greater discount on products.
Another important IMC tool is public relations which act as a complementary function to
marketing and contributes to organizational goal attainment. COSIcan build awareness by sharing
company information via news, reporters, and bloggers, to reach customers, potential prospects,
joint venture partners, investors and anyone else interested in their business. Since the shift has
now been towards digital marketing, COSI can use social media as a primary tool to reach the
mass. The strengths of PR include limited cost, endorsements, credibility from reporters and the
reach, image building and potential is exponential due to the broad audience it can adhere to.
Facebook has now over 1 billion users worldwide and using Digital PR is very cost effective in
this case. COSI can effectively use social media to launch important information that could raise
brand awareness at an exponential rate. They can use YouTube to run ad's 10 seconds
advertisement to build awareness and reveal product information. Since COSI has launched a
brand new website, its effectiveness is dependent on how well it's advertised and known; digital
PR can be used here to promote this and spread information to its clients.
A great tool for companies to directly consult with the end-users is direct marketing. Some of the
most commonly used methods to reach clients are e-mails, text messages, catalogues, brochures,
and promotional letters. This is probably the cheapest tool and easily underutilized by companies.
This tool increases company performance by being able to analyze, track record a database for

5. their clients. This helps determine what the effective target market is and what their direct-response
media is. Having the option for users to store credit card points, telephone calls, and emails are
ways in which data can be recorded. The target audience is easily identifiable using this method
and COSI can approach aggressively to interested clients. Transaction history, occupation, age,
gender, income, address can be used to get a good consumer database. For B2B database, CISO
can use revenues, purchase history, social media coordinates, credit history to effectively build
brand awareness.
E-commerce will always be a significant role of Chicken of the Sea. The goal of Chicken of the
Sea is to drive people to visit their website. Through sponsorships, loyalty programs, and
various other things they can grab a hold of the marketplace. The landscape of Tuna sales and
the way that they can do business have changed which has hampered the ability to advertise in
the modern sense. No longer can Chicken of the Sea flex its muscles by spending more than
competitors because the brands are no longer an important thing in the eyes of consumers. The
best way that Chicken of the Sea can build their brand is through customer loyalty and traffic
through their website. Everything that Chicken of the Sea does is trying to get people to their
website, and they are working to separate themselves from their competition that way. There is
no reason to change this philosophy because it is the best way to build their brand as the market
sits at this moment. The online presence is arguably the most important tool that they can use to
be successful.

6. Jessica Simpson as a Spokesperson:
There are many ways that the Chicken of the Sea’s marketing personnel and advertising agency
might evaluate the appropriateness of using Jessica Simpson as a spokesperson for the company,
as well as figure out if she is a good fit for the brand.
Firstly, Chicken of the Sea is going to have to find out if they want her as a person representing
the brand. By this we mean they have to see what she does with her music, TV shows,
interviews, etc. and see if they want her representing them as a person. Seeing as how the way
she may act could not be entirely appropriate when it comes to serving a very well put together
brand like Chicken of the Sea.
Secondly, when seeing if Jessica Simpson is appropriate or not they want to see if their target
audience has any interest in her. In the report, it states that the primary target audience for tuna is
females between the ages of 25-54, but Jessica Simpson tends to have her audience mainly made
up of teens. So, therefore, the image she may portray to the older portion of Chicken of the Sea's
target audience may not work effectively.
Another important thing Chicken of the Sea’s marketing personnel should consider evaluating is
how effectively can they use Jessica Simpson for advertising. To explain further, yes Jessica
Simpson is very talented, attractive and of course very successful but can they utilize these traits
she has to their full potential and relate them to advertising tuna? They must look into this, and
see whether or not she is the best candidate for the job, because she may have all of these

7. wonderful qualities that a marketer dreams about, but they mean nothing if they can’t help
Chicken of the Sea advertise.
In conclusion, when Chicken of the Sea is evaluating the appropriateness of using Jessica
Simpson as their spokesperson they need to consider if they want Jessica Simpson as a person to
represent their brand, decide whether or not she will fit their target audience, and lastly figure out
if they can utilize her fame for advertising.
Of course, when using a famous person like Jessica Simpson as an advertising tool for your
company, there are going to be many pros and cons. We will discuss the most important ones
and keep them as relevant as possible to the case at hand.
Pros
Some leading pros come along when using Jessica Simpson as an advertising tool. One of the
main pros is her fame; very many people will see anything she does or anything she touches. For
example, after she was invited to a sales conference in San Diego a video was released showing
an interview and highlights of the meeting. 38 million TV viewers saw this video alone.
Secondly, Jessica Simpson already has her TV show on MTV, so Chicken of the Sea can utilize
this and try and correlate some of their products in the show to be seen by many of her viewers.
Lastly, because Jessica Simpsons target audience is young females primarily, this could assist in
introducing Chicken of the Sea to a new audience that may not be familiar with the brand.
Cons
Unfortunately, for this case, in particular, we have discovered the cons outweigh the pros when it
comes to using Jessica Simpson as an advertising tool for Chicken of the Sea. As stated in the

8. article using Jessica Simpson as an advertising spokesperson would be most useful in TV
commercials. But due to the high cost of TV time, this would limit the amount of advertising
they could run, due to their small media budget. Furthermore, the target audience is also an issue;
Jessica Simpson's target audience is mostly teens. Chicken of the Sea's target audience mainly
consists of women ages 25-54, since these do not match up, she may not be the ideal candidate
for the job. Also, the article states that Jessica Simpson has a "ditzy blonde" image that may not
play well with older consumers. But not only will it not play well with older consumers, we think
the "ditzy blonde" image she has going on is not ideal for representing any professional
company.
Leverages
Chicken of the Sea uses their website which has become an important part of their
integrated marketing communications program. Chicken of the Sea already uses other forms of
media to drive consumers to their site and engage them in the brand. One example of this is
would be when consumers could enter a recipe contest online and register to win a trip to the
summer Olympics. They tried to use their sponsorship of the U.S. synchronized swim team to
drive traffic to their website. In 2003, they offered a customer loyalty program called the
mermaid club which consumers had to join through their website. Through the loyalty program
consumers also receive special orders, health tips and articles, new product updates, and most
importantly the company can reach their members via newsletter. With all of the previous things
in mind, it could easily be argued that Jessica Simpson gave Chicken of the Sea the most that she
could have by mentioning the name on her show. Given the fact that the Tuna market has

9. become increasingly competitive and in turn the money is not going towards media, Jessica
Simpson would not be a good investment for the brand.
Chicken of the Sea has the issue of allocating their money towards advertising because there are
two other major tuna brands, and the growth of private label brands. The competition has
allowed people to reach for whichever tuna is on sale or whichever tuna have the lowest shelf
price. Private brands also tend to be lower priced than the national brands. This increased
competition and greater emphasis on sales promotion have shifted the power from Manufacturers
to Retailers. This, of course, means lower profit margins because retailers pay less for tuna and
prices need to stay lower to remain competitive. In conclusion, due to all of these reasons
Chicken of the Sea must continue to try and drive people to their website and find a voice on
social media, which is cheap, to build their brand. Unfortunately, due to the cons,
Final Thoughts
Chicken of the Sea is handcuffed and must use cost effective ways to build their brand and
provide low prices to consumers because that is what consumers value the most.
Don George should not hire Jessica Simpson as their spokesperson as she is not a suitable option
to the brand. Although Jessica Simpson at the time was very popular and successful in producing
brand awareness with the music video which contained her eating Chicken of the Sea she doesn’t
mix well with the current plans that Chicken of the Sea currently has. Signing Jessica Simpson as
a spokesperson is also going to cost the chicken of the sea over at least 1 million to sign her to an
endorsement contract. The problem with this issue is that the Chicken of the Sea has a minuscule
budget for media and Jessica Simpson is not only going to cost them 1 million they also have to

10. pay for the TV advertisements since this would be the most suitable way to advertise Jessica
Simpson. The budget before seeing Jessica Simpson as an option consisted of spending most of
its media budget on radio and in magazines as well as on in-store ads such as floor signage. If
Chicken of the Sea decided to focus on the advertisements with Jessica Simpson, they would
spend all of their budgets on something that doesn't have a guaranteed return on investment. To
be able to add this type of advertising into the budget the Chicken of the Sea needs more money
in the budget to pay for the high cost of television time. Not only is this a bad idea for the budget
Jessica Simpson brings a certain target market into the equation. The image that she portrays
would be a younger audience if she were chosen to be the spokesperson it could ruin the brand
for the existing older customers.
The risk from allowing Jessica Simpson to be the spokesperson is only being negotiated because
she would gain a new target audience but is that worth losing the customers the Chicken of the
Sea currently has and likely these would be the most loyal customers that they have. Another
important thing that could happen from hiring Jessica Simpson could be losing the original
iconic status of the mermaid that the Chicken of the Sea uses as their logo. Losing the iconic
status and reputation of the mermaid could ruin the outlook of the company. If the Chicken of the
Sea were to use Jessica Simpson, they would also have to use her primary for her looks and
current image and doing so could change the outlook and status of the mermaid. Looking at both
of the Q scores for exhibit 1 and exhibit 2 which were obtained from Marketing
Evaluations/TVQ, Inc Jessica Simpson would mainly only attract a younger audience which was
ages between 6-17 in males and females. This demographic had very high scores in liking Jessica
Simpson and female musical performers which ranged from a total Q score of 20+ for this age

11. group. On the other end, the older audiences ages from 35-54 didn't have high Q scores which
allow us to believe that Jessica Simpson would most likely not benefit the older audiences from
her being the main spokesperson.
Although Jessica Simpson could potentially attract a new target market, Don George should not
hire her as the spokesperson. When you look at the negatives, they outweigh the positives, and
there is a better opportunity with keeping the one million in spending money to spend on other
IMC tools. Spending money on other IMC tools such as radio, magazines and store ads such as
floor signage could improve the brand image and brand equity of the Chicken of the Sea and is a
better decision overall.