Question

The brand is Apple and the Product is AirPods

1. Discuss the brand’s marketing and communication strategy as it relates to ethics and the principles of conscious capitalism. Would you consider the brand’s messaging ethical? Does the brand implement principles of conscious capitalism? Could the brand potentially improve its messaging by focusing more on either of these? Why?
2. Using your evaluation of the internal and external factors that affect consumer buying behavior and your knowledge of the consumer decision-making process, summarize how the brand’s target consumers make the decision to buy the product. (C. 5.2)
3. Make two or three recommendations for marketing and communication strategies the brand could employ to increase sales and profits for the target market. Justify your recommendations with specific reasons, facts, and examples from your research and the course materials.

Answer 1

(a). Yes, I could consider brand messaging. Brand messaging refers to the underlying value proposition conveyed and language used in your content. It's what makes buyers relate to your brand by inspiring them, persuading them, motivating them, and ultimately making them want to buy your product.

(b). Also, the brand implements principles of conscious capitalism. For Apply company, each and every product is an individual product and all have separate marketing mix.

Conscious capitalism has four pillars guiding a business for conducting socially responsible and ethical practices: purpose, stakeholder, culture, and leadership.

Higher purpose: This is the idea that every business has a purpose that goes beyond making money. “While making money is essential for the vitality and sustainability of a business, it is not the only or even the most important reason a business exists.” By focusing on its higher purpose, “a business may inspire, engage and energize its stakeholders.”

Stakeholder orientation: This is the idea that life and the human foundations of business are independent, and a business needs to create value with and for its various stakeholders. Like the life forms in an ecosystem, healthy stakeholders lead to a healthy business system. Conscious businesses focus on their “whole business ecosystem, creating and optimizing value for all of their stakeholders.

Conscious leadership: This is the idea that conscious leaders understand and embrace the higher purpose of business and focus on creating value for and harmonizing the interests of the business stakeholders.

Conscious culture: This is the ethos – the values, principles, practices – underlying the social fabric of a business, which “permeates the atmosphere of a business and connects the stakeholders to each other and to the purpose, people and processes that comprise the company.”

(c). In order to establish a new brand product, we should put a series of actions.

1. Rethink the Need for Advertising

2. Avoid Price Wars by Emphasizing Your Unique Value Proposition

3. Keep Your Marketing and Your Products Simple

4. Know Your Audience and Talk to Them in Their Language

5. Design a Better Customer Experience

6. Aim at Your Prospects’ Emotions

7. Build a Community of Users or Customers

(d) Consumer buying process consists of sequential steps the consumer follows to arrive at the final buying decisions. Mostly, consumers follow a typical buying process. Marketer must know how consumers reach the final decision to buy the product.

The typical buying process involves five stages the consumer passes through described as under:

1. Problem Identification:

This step is also known as recognizing of unmet need. The need is a source or force of buying behaviour. Buying problem arises only when there is unmet need or problem is recognized. Need or problem impels an individual to act or to buy the product.

2. Information Search:

Interested consumer will try to seek information. Now, he will read newspapers and magazines, watch television, visit showroom or dealer, contact salesman, discuss with friends and relatives, and try all the possible sources of information.

3. Evaluation of Alternatives:

In the former stage, the consumer has collected information about certain brands. Now, he undergoes evaluation of brands. He cannot buy all of them. Normally, he selects the best one, the brand that offers maximum satisfaction. Here, he evaluates competitive brands to judge which one is the best, the most attractive. Evaluation calls for evaluating various alternatives with certain choice criteria.

The brand that meets most of the above conditions reasonably is more likely to be preferred. Marketer should highlights superior features of his brand.

4. Purchase Decision:

This is the stage when the consumer prefers one, the most promising band, out of several brands. The former stage helps consumers evaluate various brands in the choice set. The brand that offers maximum benefits or satisfaction is preferred.

Simply, the most attractive brand, that can offer more benefits in relation to price paid, is selected by comparing one brand with others. Comparison shows superiority/inferiority of the brands.

Now, consumer makes up his mind to purchase the most preferred brand.

The first factor is attitudes of others. The impact of other persons’ attitudes depends on degree of their negative attitudes toward the consumer’s preferred brand, and consumer’s degree of compliance with other persons’ wishes.

The second factor is unanticipated situational factors. Purchase intension may change due to certain unanticipated situational factors like price hike, loss of job, family income, major medical expenses, non-availability of the preferred brand, or such similar factors.

Sub-decisions in Purchase Decision:

Consumer’s buying decision involves following five sub-decisions:

i. Brand Decision:

For example, CBZ (model) motorbike of Hero Honda.

ii. Vender Decision:

For example, XYZ Hero Honda Showroom.

iii. Quantity Decision:

For example, one motorbike.

iv. Timing Decision:

For example, on 1st December, 2007.

v. Payment Decision:

5. Post-purchase Decisions:

Consumer buys the product with certain expectations. Though he decides very systematically, there is no guarantee of a complete satisfaction. There is always possibility of variation between the expected level of satisfaction and the actual satisfaction. His subsequent behaviour is influenced by degree of satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Marketer must monitor the post-purchase experience of the buyers that includes:

a. Post-purchase Satisfaction

b. Post-purchase Action

c. Post-purchase Use and Disposal

(e). There are a lot of marketing strategies which we can make use of. Some of them are-

1.PPC Advertising

PPC, or pay-per-click, advertising is a type of online ad model that allows small businesses to display their ads to people searching online for relevant products and services.

Pay-per-click works just like it sounds – you pay each time a consumer clicks on your ad content.

Though Facebook and other ad platforms use the pay-per-click model, we are going to focus on PPC ads that are displayed on Google and other search engines.

You may be wondering, how exactly do PPC ads work on search engines?

Well, advertisers have to bid on certain keywords that are relevant to their product or service offering. The search engine uses an algorithm to determine which ads show up on the search engine results page (SERP) based on quality, relevance, and validity.

Much like SEO, the keyword research plays an important role in PPC ad campaigns as you have to bid on keywords that would most likely be used by relevant leads.

Google Ads (you may have previously heard it referred to as Google AdWords), is the most popular PPC advertising platform. Since the majority of consumers are using the Google search engine to search for information about products and services, Google is a great place to start with your PPC advertising.

Google uses keyword relevance, landing page quality, and other factors to determine your quality score, which impacts when and where your ads are served on the SERP for related search queries.

The first step to creating PPC ad campaigns is conducting keyword research. This is a time-consuming yet vital process as your entire campaign is built around the keywords that you choose.

An effective PPC keyword list should be relevant and exhaustive, including both popular, frequently searched terms and other less competitive long tail keywords. As search trends are constantly changing, it’s important to continue to expand and refine your PPC keywords list over time to make sure you’re getting the best possible return on investment (ROI) for your ad campaigns.

If no one on your team has experience managing Google Ads or creating and managing PPC ad campaigns, then we highly recommend that you don’t try to tackle this yourself. PPC ads cost money every time someone clicks on them, which means that if you don’t know the ins and outs of PPC advertising, you may be wasting your budget on strategies and tactics that just don’t work.

Instead, you can hire a Google AdWords management agency to help create and manage your campaigns. Our agency not only has experience managing PPC ad campaigns for small businesses from a variety of industries, but our team stays up-to-date on the latest best practices and strategies. We also provide Google Shopping Ads services and Google remarketing services to help you capture more relevant traffic on the search engines.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important marketing strategies for small businesses. SEO is the process of optimizing your site structure and content to make it easier for search engines to crawl or “read.” By making small changes to your site and developing content that focuses on relevant keywords, you can work to rank higher on the search engine results page. The higher you rank on Google, the more opportunities you will have to drive new traffic to your site.

SEO is especially important for small businesses because consumers who are searching for brands to buy from locally often use their mobile device to find nearby locations. By optimizing your site and content for local SEO, you can increase your chances of appearing in these local mobile search results. As an added note, it’s also important that your site is mobile responsive, which means that it can easily be accessed and navigated through on a mobile device.

You can start with a site audit. Whether you choose to conduct the audit yourself or hire an experienced SEO agency, a site audit is the first step in understanding where your site stands when it comes to search engine optimization. The audit will take a look at your on-page SEO to determine your website’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to search engine optimization. This includes both your site structure as well as content.

Search engine optimization is important, but it can be a bit tricky, especially if you don’t have an in-house experts that knows the ins and outs of optimizing your site for search engines like Google. Fortunately, this is something that can very easily be outsourced to an SEO marketing agency.

3. C

1. ontent Marketing

Content marketing is at the center of most marketing strategies for small businesses. Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing quality content that is relevant to your target audience and provides some time of value for readers or viewers. The key to developing great content marketing is knowing what your audience cares about most, including their greatest challenges, needs, and desires.

Unlike some paid marketing strategies for small businesses, content marketing focuses on the long-term. You can use quality content to improve your SEO. However, it’s also beneficial if you want to build trust with your audience, promote a positive brand image, and foster powerful relationships with your leads and customers.

In the end, content marketing provides an attractive return on investment for any brand because you can continue to share and promote content long after the original piece is published.

Before you get started with your content marketing, you’ll need to make sure that you have clearly defined your audience and gathered information about them. Creating buyer personas is a great way to ensure that your audience is at the center of all your content marketing efforts.

Buyer personas are generalized profiles of your target buyers, containing data like demographics, challenges, likes and preferences, buying behaviors, and other information that’s vital to getting to know your customer.

Once you’ve gotten to know your buyers well, it’s time to brainstorm some possible content topics. Start with your audience’s greatest challenges. What questions do customers often ask? What do consumers need to know more about before making a purchasing decision? This is a great starting point for developing topics for a wide range of content from blog and social media posts to infographics and ebooks.

When developing topics for your content, it’s important to consider the where your leads are in their buyer’s journey. Different topics and content types work better for different parts of the funnel.

For example, a video that gives an overview of the person’s greatest challenge works well during the awareness stage when the consumer is first becoming aware of the problem.

However, a case study or use case might work better to help those who are ready to make a purchase better understand how your brand can benefit them.

Creating and publishing quality content on a consistent basis is not easy. It requires time and resources to ensure that your content is not only relevant and valuable but of the same high quality that your products and services are.

If you don’t have the resources in-house to sustain a consistent content calendar, it may be time to call in the experts. For example, hiring an agency for blogging services is a great way to ensure that you’re consistently putting out new content that attracts and engages your target buyers.