workbook 2

1. Understanding
the principal
methods and
techniques
used in
marketing and
public relationships
Marketing:
Why is it important in marketing to understanding your clients and their requirements?
It is important to understand the client’s aims and to support them fully whether you think they are
wrong, they are not graphic designers or journalists but you have to be on their side to complete the
task. A reason why it is important to understand is that the client could be talking to several other
people who could fulfil their requests and pay them even if it is obscure. Once you understand the
work you are completing for the client it is one of the first steps into building a client relationship,
there you can go forward into helping them improve their ideas and have a good basis into creating
the product or the design work. It is also easier to negotiate with the client when you say that you will
use some of their ideas as well as working with the professional team and therefore it looks good on
yourself as well as pleasing the client. Everybody has a different motive to follow and it is going to be
different to everybody else’s, also another part of understanding your client is assisting them into
looking at existing products an how they can go one better with your help.
Why is understanding the market you are working in important? What techniques and tools could
be used to help someone understand their market?
Firstly, in understanding the market you have to consider an in-depth research on existing products
and their media pack and whether it is similar or different to your intended market. Drawing from
previous experience in the Recipe Cards unit, a lot of time was devoted to looking at existing
products, how long they had been sold and who they are aiming at the most. The competition is the
main objective in understanding the market as it shows how you can improve your specific product
and the weaknesses of the opposing business. The main tool for understanding the market is lots of
research, for one you can find out about your audience in a generalised term and then find out about
gaps in the market place for the product, finally you can see where other companies are ranked in the
market and create your own market type based on that. In this stage the consumers are also
important, not looking at individual demographics but in the sense that you can get an idea of what
vibe your market has and where you want to take them with your product. Finding a gap in the

2. market may be easy or tricky depending if you are working towards a niche target audience or a
mainstream one, therefore it is important to understand the definition of a niche market, and not
pinpoint one particular genre of people as you have then not looked at other existing products in a
wider area.
What is a SWOT analysis? Why are they are they a useful tool?
SWOT analysis is looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your product.
This can be produced in a chart form and asses the positives of what the outcome would be for your
product and the potential threats and weaknesses it could face. It can be used in a business context
or a personal one, it is useful in helping to carve out the future end product, you have to think about
what could go wrong and not deny any threats or weaknesses. Some of the things to consider
strength wise would be:
• What advantage does your organization have?
• What do you do better than anyone else?
• What unique or lowest cost resources can you draw upon that other’s can’t?
• What do people in your market see as your strengths?
• What factors mean that you “get the sale”?
(http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05.htm)

3. It is necessary not to ignore the weaknesses and threats as you may need a back up plan to
know how to deal with the problems arising. Likewise as well as identifying your own SWOT
analysis you have to be aware of competitors strengths and opportunities and use them to
hinder your opposing company – make you stronger. The opportunities category is mainly
about taking advantage of current market trends and competitors’ rise, the threats sector is
showing what the company is scared of most, who will exploit them and who’s working
against them. This part of the SWOT analysis is useful because it asks questions that probably
the company wouldn’t have arose beforehand, you can’t conclude just yet but you are
prepare to answer questions.
What is audience profiling? What sort of information might be included in an audience profile?
Audience profiling is much like a demographic experiment, this is where the company makes a
generalised assumption of the intended audience by building knowledge about them. The sort of
information that might be included in an audience profile is such how the audience interacts with
other services and products considering the company and how they perceive the company’s
products. The majority of profiling also includes; age, gender, life stage, income band, property value,
lifestyle choices etc. Once looking at the stages – building up a knowledge about consumers and
organisations you can move on to looking at their location and product choices before finally
developing a deeper understanding of how consumers are viewing your product and other products
surrounding you, whether this be a necessity like groceries or luxury like designer clothing.

4. Select a magazine and find their audience profile:
The main highlight to take from this media pack is the insight into the specific age range and then a
separate tag along being specific about including children. The income band is also straddled in the
higher and bottom end of working class, women being the main target. Mostly everyone knows that
these types of magazines are targeted at women in that certain bracket with a mix of real life,
fashion, beauty, food, home, travel and competitions. Although the desired age range is 25 – 55 with
children, anyone can read it based on the stories, the design and the colour. Interestingly the
magazine is expecting that the age bracket in which it starts – 25, will have children, where it is
particularly not a young age the stereotypical social grade status shows that women in that bracket
and higher wait until later life for children, focusing on education and jobs first. Showing the net
circulation and price it is no wonder that that it has strong customer loyalty and a readership of
1,799,000 females and 2,050,000 adults.
Explain in detail the 4 different elements of the marketing mix.
The marketing mix is used for any business venture and organisation, it is the combination of;
product, price, place and promotion.
• Product – the features and appearance of goods and services. The main questions you can ask
yourself in this stage are; what does the product need to satisfy? How and where will the
customer use it? How is it sufficient to customers? How is it branded? These are some of the
simple questions to ask yourself and combines the priority of your customer and how your
product needs not wants to be sufficient and above satisfactory.
• Place – the point where products are made available to customers. One of the main questions
for this is ‘what do your competitors do and how can you learn from that?’ I think that this is
one of the strongest elements because you are at the point of experiencing a tough market
and the only way you can move forward is to learn from your competitors and then try to go
one further, exploring trade fairs, supermarkets or even boutiques. Most likely you will have
to differentiate from your opposing businesses, this can come into use with the SWOT
analysis as you can use their weaknesses to build around the place your product will sell best.

5. • Price – how much customers will pay for a product. As well as setting your product in the
pound region, you also need to consider what value it will have on the customer to put the
price tag on. Going back to the competitors, in market research you will already have looked
at existing products including their price range, this is the time to compare and contrast and
to beat them to the sale. Also considering discounts can make a difference because the
consumer will compare for themselves and will ultimately go for the cheaper deal based on
the modern product buying deals.
• Promotion – the main idea of promotion is getting your messages to your target market and
reaching your audience in the best way possible way this could be via TV, radio, press or the
internet, depending solely on what your audience uses the most. One of the major downfalls
is also choosing the best time to promote because of the different trends, seasonal
opportunities and big occasions, choosing a quiet period in the market can go two ways, it
can stay quiet or open that door for you.
The marketing mix helps you define the marketing elements by positioning your market offer
especially starting on a business venture, working with the SWOT chart already created you
can fit your strengths and opportunities around promotion and working with your target
audience.
Select a publication, product or audience and explain the range of marketing materials that they
use.
Take A Break is one of the longest serving women’s weekly magazines compared to its competitors.
The biggest marketing material that we are all familiar with is print, the magazine is consumed every
Thursday, the magazine is updated with the same layout and theme of stories but are truthful and are
not doctored. One of the main reasons print works for this magazine is because the intended target
market can sympathise with whoever has written the story without directly communicating, words
can also manipulate the reader and turn them against or for the victim/criminal although the wording
is not necessarily in a formal register or too hard to read. The print publication also includes
photographs and cover pictures, it lets the reader visualise the horror or tragedy and create an
emotional level with the audience this can easily be done with the target audience mostly expected
to having young children. You could say that the magazine is interacting with the reader as well as
interviewing the celebrity, the interaction between the celebrity and the consumer tends to be
mutual i.e. discussing weight loss tips, coping with children etc, the interaction then goes to prove
again that the magazine has made sure that the target audience can relate and create an emotional
bond with the other women putting their story in the publication – this is good marketing because
once the audience has been captivated, they will eventually become loyal and create a reader
relationship. More cross media marketing materials occur in bigger organisations where audio and
video become more widely available.
Provide your own definition of advertising.

6. Advertising is the communicating side to marketing; it can encourage and manipulate consumers into
buying or doing something, mainly buying products. Advertisements appear in all shapes and forms
including television, web banners and in publications. Advertising has become a distinct way of
changing people’s opinions based on what they hear and see, this is where the manipulative side
comes across, if the advert can convince you to change products they have done their job. The most
common manipulative advertising at the minute seems to be supermarkets and their brand match –
in the run up to Christmas, ASDA had been constantly putting their advert wherever possible to
convince consumers that they would be guaranteed a cheaper weekly shop. It is also clever the way
advertisers place their adverts in the time of day, aside from television, audio advertisements also
have selected choices, and car dealerships are advertising their new cars on morning breakfast shows
as consumers are commuting to work. Advertising has the most powerful influence on perceptions,
when communication is key they need to be on the same level as their consumers, speaking their
dialect and making sure that the product is sustained to be interesting so that the consumer doesn’t
skip the advert on the TV or walk by it on the street if it is on billboard material.
What is the purpose of sponsorship? Support your answer with detailed examples.
Sponsorships are a way of getting companies to promote themselves, this can be done by holding
events, on the shirts of football teams or sponsoring a TV programme like Emmerdale or Coronation
Street. My first example is football sponsors, these type of companies range from airlines to banks,
some companies are not just the shirt sponsor but part of the stadium like The Emirates (Arsenal – Fly
Emirates the airline) or The Ethiad (Manchester City, Ethiad airlines). With these types of sponsors,
celebrity endorsement can also be recognised. The sponsors are usually placed in the middle of the
shirt where it is most visible on TV and the crowd, the sole purpose of the sponsorship here is to get
brands noticed when the camera is panned on one person, people remember the sponsor the more
times they see the footballer or the ground. A different example of sponsorship is in the form of
adverts before a soap like Coronation Street, mini TV adverts from Cadbury or furniture stores run
before the programme promoting in a clever way where most people would be either unwrapping
chocolates to sit and eat in front of the telly and be sat at home in a living room full of furniture.
Sponsors in events is a good way of promoting too, with thousands of people wearing the logo,
raising money for the brand or drinking and eating the brand. Some of the more specific events like
the London Marathon – runners raise money for charities thus they wear fancy dress or specially
made t-shirts to show everyone the cause they are running for, with the event televised there is every
opportunity to get noticed this is one of the nicer ways into sponsorship.

7. What is the purpose of endorsements? Explain a range of different types of endorsements and use
examples.
The most common use of endorsement we see is in celebrities they are part of the company's
marketing campaign, hopefully used as an influence on their own fans to end up buying the products.
It is not always celebrities, other types of endorsements include professionals in a certain field of
work like the dentists on toothpaste adverts. The person(s) involved in an endorsement campaign are
required to make positive statements this is quite different to advertising were there isn't a
manipulative manner however more persuasive. Regarding the dentist example, the professional is
persuading the consumer to buy the product because it works for him/her and they are the expert so
they know that it works. The other example is on sports equipment – this is celebrity endorsement
where the sports stars are required to test the products and then promote them using social media
and on advertisements, this works primarily on young fans as they want what their favourite sports
star is wearing, influential footballers like Cristiano Ronaldo have teamed up with brands like f50 and
therefore that is where the influence starts. Sometimes actors are also hired to give advertisements a
sense of ordinary where they are connected to people like you and I
Why could holding an event be a good marketing strategy? What are some of the opportunities and
threats of holding an event?

8. What is merchandising? Use detailed examples to help explain.
Public Relations:
What is the purpose of a press release? What sort of things should a good press release contain?
What is the purpose of an electronic media pack? What sort of things should a good electronic
media pack contain?

9. What is the purpose of a PR briefing? Why should you create one? Explain some of the areas a brief
should cover.
What is the purpose of a press conference? Why might you hold one? Use specific examples to help
you with your response.
Why could hand-outs be useful when managing a PR event?
What are some of the advantages of holding an interview instead of a press conference?

10. Why do people set up film and picture opportunities? Use examples to help our response.
Why are contacts and networking important in marketing and PR? What kinds of contacts could be
useful? Provide details of a PR contact from at least one organisation.