13 Epic Twitter Fails by Big Brands, Essay Example

Chapter 17/18 Summary

Chapter 17 examines the roles and functions of public relations, publicity and corporate advertising. The concepts discussed at the beginning of the chapter are the traditional and new roles of public relations. I chose to focus on new roles of public relations for this section of the assignment. The text notes that “an increasing number of marketing-oriented companies have established new responsibilities for public relations” (Belch 573). Meaning that PR now takes on a much “broader perspective, designed to promote the organization as well as its products and.or services” (Belch 573).

Marketing public relations are public relations activities that are meant to support marketing objectives. Marketing public relations, as stated by the text, add value to an integrated marketing program by building marketplace excitement before media advertising breaks, improving ROI, creating advertising news where there is no product news, introducing a product with little or no advertising, providing a value-added customer service, building brand-to-customer bonds, influencing the influentials and defending products at risk and giving consumers a reason to buy (Belch 573-575).

A more in depth look at these values that marketing public relations (MPR) brings to marketing programs states that building marketplace excitement, means that a company can build anticipation and awareness of a new product before it is released, therefore adding effectiveness to later advertising efforts (Belch 574). MPR can also improve ROI by “reducing overall marketing costs” and still deliver effective outcomes (Belch 574). By creating advertising news when there is no product news, MPR is able build awareness with just advertising, therefore building hype in various situations (Belch 574). Introducing a product with little to no advertising has worked for big brands with name recognition, such as Apple and Segway (Belch 574). Providing value-added customer service refers to marketing campaigns that have a purpose, such as food brands offering recipes on their websites (Belch 575). MPR also builds brand-to-customer bonds by providing consumers with activities such as contests, for example, Pillsbury offers its consumers to submit baked goods for competitions (Belch 575). The last two values that MPR offers is providing information to opinion-leaders and taking “constructive actions to defend or promote a company’s products” (Belch 575).

Chapter 18 focuses on measuring the effectiveness of promotional programs. Specifically, it gives the reasons, as well as the reasons not to measure effectiveness of promotional programs. The text lists four reasons to measure effectiveness as avoiding costly mistakes, evaluating alternative strategies, increasing the efficiency of advertising in general and determining if objectives are achieved (Belch 603-604). In its reasons not to measure effectiveness, the text states that cost, research problems, disagreement on what to test, objections of creative and time are all important aspects to consider. This means that the cost is often high to conduct good research thus leading to the next problem—research issues. Research can be expensive and unreliable. There are also disagreements on what to test, for example, there may be disagreements between people in the firm, as well as changes in the research objectives over the life-cycle of the product. Objections of creative means that many creative teams at agencies do not prefer their work to be measured and tested, stating that creativity cannot be measured by running tests. The last issue discussed is time, which refers to simply not having enough time to do testing and research, as there is already so many aspects that go into advertising (Belch 603-607).

Works Cited

Belch, George, E., and A. Belch, Michael. “Advertising and promotion.” An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective. New York: MacGraw Hill Higher Education (2012).

Bhasin, Kim. “13 Epic Twitter Fails By Big Brands.” Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 6 Feb. 2012. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. <http://www.businessinsider.com/13-epic-twitter-fails-by-big-brands-2012-2?op=1>.

Fisher, Stephanie. “3 Great Examples of Crisis Management on Social Media.” 3 Great Examples of Crisis Management on Social Media. 2 Aug. 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.<http://blog.spinweb.net/3-great-examples-of-crisis-management-on-social-media>.

Wynne, Robert. “Winning Social Media Strategies For Public Relations.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 28 Apr. 2014. Web. 29 Oct. 2015 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwynne/2014/04/28/winning-social-media-strategies-for-public-relations/>.

Seiple, Pamela. “How to Leverage Social Media for Public Relations Success.” HubSpot. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. <http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13204195-pdf/docs/hubspot_social_media_pr_ebook.pdf>.