BARBARA SNAIL

8-1 Blog: Marketing

My advice to someone who is beginning their journey in integrated marketing communications is think creatively. Innovation is key in this industry of AI. Coming up with your own original innovations are important to keep you ahead of the generic thinking. Thinking creatively involves analysis, open-mindedness, problem-solving, organization, and communication. All of these attributes are very important in this field.

First we start with analysis. We use analysis to study the companies history, background, and position for our marketing strategy. It is very important to analyze the company you are creating a campaign for. This is where you will begin to brainstorm ideas of where you need to go with the campaign. A SWOT analysis should also be done to find out a companies internal weaknesses and strengths and external opportunities and threats. A target market analysis of the personas demographics and pychographics is a necessity. Second you will define your SMART goals using organization and problem-solving. SMART goals are used to organize Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals in your marketing campaign. They are the road map to your marketing strategy. Next you will use metrics to measure the KPI’s of your marketing campaign. These KPI’s will need to be analyzed and throughout your campaign and used to adjust the path to your goals. Once you make the adjustment they need to be communication to company employees and stakeholders. An open-mindedness is used during the stages of analyzing the KPI’s for making adjustment in the campaign.

All of these efforts need to follow an ethical best practices guidelines. Ethical standards are important to follow because they are the backbone of all your work. All of your advertising must build trust and integrity in your brand and the way to do this is to follow ethical guidelines. Never be deceptive or misleading in advertising. A good example is, when Vitaminwater marketed there product as healthier than soda but in fact it was filled with eight teaspoons of sugar which makes it unhealthy in comparison for most people (Myrick, n.d.). Lesson learned with this scenario do not state incorrect facts. You must be very careful in making healthy claims. Always make sure your claims are backed-up by reputable third-party data. This will cause a loss of trust in your product and this can snowball into a huge loss for your company. We should always follow the ethical guideline of never providing deceptive, false, or misleading information in promotions.

References:

Richard Myrick (n.d.) 21 Real Examples of Unethical and False Marketing Practices for 2022. https://mobile-cuisine.com/marketing/unethical-and-false-marketing//