Understanding the Functions of Mark eting and PR

Use this work book to help you explain the functions of marketing and public relations. You should ensure you use additional examples to support your explanations.

MarketingMarket research is what companies or projects do to collect research to help sell and advertise their product. This can be done in many different ways such as questionnaires and interviews. It is important because you need to know as much information about your target audience and other companies that are similar so you know what to fight against and you need to know what you need to do best to help your product sell.

Market analysis is research into “attractiveness and the dynamics of a special market” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_analysis) it looks into the strengths and weaknesses of a business. This helps with decisions that companies need to make, it helps then decide whether to do it or not. This helps to edit your product or business because you can analyse the responses and use them to make your product better. You can also analyse different promotion types for example you can see how well advertising on the TV works compared to advertising on a bus shelter, and see which is best for your specific product/business.

A marketing strategy is a plan that allows company’s to organize all their resources and ideas to help achieve their overall aim which could be to increase sales or to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. This plan can include basic to long term information about what they are planning. An example would be for a celebrity, they would plan out what date they will do the promotion and then they will look at the response from that promotion.

Advertising is important to an organisation because they need some way of getting people to know about the product and they need people to know because if no one knows then no one is going to buy it or respond. For example if a famous artist is bringing out a new song they will advertise the song for months in advance so people know to go buy it on the date it is release. This will help the overall selling amount because more and more people know

Brand promotion is similar to marketing strategy where you are trying to increase your product awareness. It mostly focuses on the main parts of the product unlike businesses change their promotion according to what is happening in the market. To promote your brand you could create several posters to place around on billboards and bus shelters.

PRYou need to make sure that the message you put across to your audience about the product you are advertising is the best you can do because you need to try get as many customers as you can and you don’t get that if you put your product down and make it look bad. An example of this is a toothpaste advert, you will see the actors within the TV advert they will have perfect white teeth and they will say that the product is the best and will make your teeth just like theirs. This works because then you will see the advert and want teeth like them therefore you will go out and buy it.

Positive publicity is something good about someone. And example of this is when you look in a magazine you will see a good image of a celebrity posting and ready for the picture. This is good because it put a good image across of the person making people have positive look on that specific celebrity which helps the celebrity’s reputation. Another example would be that the celebrity Justin Bieber does a lot of stuff for charities and helps people out by donating money, but because the stories that are put in the magazines and news papers are all bad things that he has done, his reputation has turned into a bad reputation.

But what is seen is this:

Spin is a form of propaganda this is achieved by an interpretation of an event to change the publics opinion. This is done a lot within politicians because they claim against their opponents that they are truthful and are much better eve if they’re not because it persuades the public to go on their side.

A person or company will engage in damage limitations because it is something that limits the damage effects of an accident or error. It makes quite bad accidents into something a lot smaller when it’s impossible to avoid the accident completely, therefore helping the person or company out to avoid accidents that could defect the entire company.An example of this would be when Tesco had ben caught selling meat such as pre-made dinners and burgers that included horse meat. This blew up because Tesco had always promoted their meat to be 100% pure mean which goes completely against what happened. They started then saying that if you want cheaper food this is what you are going to get, because most food that are sold are imported from other countries and this makes it a lot cheaper for the companies making it cheaper for the customers, so they said that if we stop thins then you are going to have to pay more for food that isn’t imported. After this a lot of their customers will be happy to pay more because they want better quality food.

What benefit could there be to an organisation to create an event? Use an example of a marketing or PR event to support your responses.The benefit of an organisation creating an event would be people would be more and more aware of that organisation creating a larger audience helping the business. An example of an event would be when a company are releasing a film they have a huge even called a premier, where lots of celebrities are invited to watch the film, and a lot of the fan can come along too to meet some of the celebrities or see them waling down the red carpet. This works well because it get more and more people to know about the film making more people watch it helping the business out because they have made more profit.What is lobbying and who is most likely to be influenced by it?Lobbying is persuading people towards one side or towards someone’s opinion, they do this in many ways such as getting an MP to put across their opinion and those who look up to that person will want to agree with them because they idolise them in a way. “Lobbying is the practice of individuals and organisations trying to influence the opinions of MPs and Lords” (http://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/have-your-say/lobbying/).