A company’s global marketing strategy

Introduction

Background

Globalization provides companies with opportunities and challenges from a marketing perspective when executives determine to present their services and products across borders. In order to pursue global market opportunities, a company’s global marketing strategy addresses whether a standardization or adaptation approach should be used for each marketing mix element. (Keegan & Green, 2017)Marketers must manage the four P’s in the traditional marketing mix in order to influence the customer’s purchase behavior. These four P’s are product, price, place, and promotion. The promotion P consists of advertising, direct marketing, personal selling, public relations, publicity, and sales promotion (Mangold & Faulds, 2009).

These promotional tools can enhance the social development and economic progress of a societ. According to the American Heritage Dictionary (2000) as referred to in Richards & Curran (2002) advertising is used to attract public attention through a paid announcement for a product or business in broadcast, print, or electronic media. It can help persuade a consumer, create product and brand awareness, and communicate a product’s benefits whether they are social, emotional or functional . A challenge with advertising is that consumers are not open to this type of communication and often attempt to resist its persuasion. A key point in marketing communication is brand awareness, which consists of brand recognition and brand recall.

Brand awareness is when a customer can identify a brand within a category when making a purchase decision. It is not always necessary to remember the brand name, an image of the package that stimulates a response to the brand can be enough, meaning that brand recognition can be enough for a customer at point of purchase. In general, a majority of companies desire high recognition of their brands and view it as one of their goals with marketing. Problem specifikationIn recent years, media consumption has changed tremendously. Viewers have gained more control over their media consumption and therefore moved toward online video consumption instead of watching traditional broadcast channels. Digital video recorders or on-demand programming has led to the possibility for viewers to determine their own viewing schedule compared to traditional broadcast channels.

According to Gupta et al. (2000), Russell (2002), and Ferraro & Avery (2000) product placement is more preferable than traditional advertising for persuasive messages. Today this has become one of marketers’ strategic communication choices, due to the fact that they have to find innovative and nontraditional ways to promote their products and reach the target audience. In comparison with traditional advertising, product placement offers a subtler and less intrusive way to cut through commercial clutter. From a marketer’s perspective, the use of product placement in movies offers a unique way to make their brands popular and immortal, this provides an exceptional message reach and long message life. Among the existing media platforms for product placement, movies are increasing in popularity when targeting a worldwide audience and advertisers consider this to be a cost-effective option to reach an international market.

However, the increased use of product placement causes a problem. In cases where a brand takes a significant role in the story, viewers may realize that the brand was placed to affect their judgments and it can be perceived as a traditional advertising message, which is the exact opposite of what marketers are trying to achieve with the use of product placement. The strongest criticism towards product placement is that it has a tendency to entail subconscious and subliminal promotional effects. Research has assumed that placements can affect people to a certain degree below their level of conscious awareness, meaning it is difficult for consumers to control their acceptance or rejection of the product placement message. Another criticism is that some perceive the practice of product placement as deceptive.

Marketers and advertisers prefer to place their brands in Hollywood produced movies. A typical Hollywood movie can reach over 100 million consumers as it moves from box office to DVD or video to TV. Most prior research has been done on attitudes towards product placement in movies and television shows, with focus on brand recognition and overall acceptance (McKechnie & Zhou, 2003; Tiwsakul, Hackley & Szmigin, 2005; Karrh, Frith & Callison, 2001). Karrh (1998) stated that practitioners believe recognition is one of the most appropriate for evaluating a placements success, based on memory measure of effectiveness. Brand recognition is when consumers have the ability to correctly identify a brand if they heard or saw it. A way for products to be recognized by the audience is if the product has some defining features.

According to Brennan et al. (1999) a placement is effective when 20% or more of the audience can identify the brand. Marketing researchers and practitioners have recognized that congruence means that some things go together while others do not (Fleck & Quester, 2007). A higher degree of congruence is created when integrating a brand more strongly into the plot. In other words, the perceived fit between the movie and the brand will increase when the placement is connected to the plot. Perceived fit is measured by the audience and to what degree they perceive the matchup between the movie and the brand. It is argued that plot connection influence audience perceptions of congruence positively, since consumers that are exposed to congruent placements in a movie will more easily develop positive brand attitudes.

AIMMy goal with this study is to describe the theory behind produced placement and analyze if product placement affect customers purchase making-process. This study is not restricted to a yes or no answer and is concluded to provide relevant information within this fieldDeliminationThere is a very big variety of product placement strategies within the marketing field. With regards to the Information Technology adapted by many companies, it is a very big subject to research within. My delimitation for this study is therefore to consider the basic theories for produce placement, to be able to understand how sales promotions impact customers.

Method

Below section will cover the method use to achieve the purpose of this study. It will present concepts to how the method procedure carried out, how the method selection was made and a critical review of the method. ProcedureThe method of this study is restricted to secondary research, where the requirement is to use data produced by third party sources. This study will therefore be based on literature studies such as, books, articles and websites.