Each question is weighted equally, and this exam represents 20% of your final grade.
Put your responses in a Word document with your name and student number at the top. Title it “COMM 346 Midterm [your name]” and email it to the instructor: stanyerm@unbc.ca
Option 1: Starting a Conversation
“We are truly living in a multi-million-channel media universe, but in no way does it resemble the top down, broadcast dominated environment we accessed while growing up. It is a media landscape marked by infinite choice and infinite noise. The brands that garner the most attention are not the ones whose ads travel down fiber optics to captivate a loyal viewing audience, but the ones whose stories travel from consumer to consumer … Marketing communication as we know it – from direct mail and print, to television and, yes, digital advertising online as well – represented the status quo. It is media-dependent, generally one way, and increasingly falls short in an interconnected Web 2.0 environment. Sure, now and then a campaign rises above the clutter to drive awareness, get people talking, and generate desired results, but the impact is fleeting. As soon as the campaign ends … there is a disconnect. What was the call to action, if any? What has been done to start an ongoing conversation?
“Marketers superficially experiment with a laundry list of new tools – they set up their Twitter accounts, create Facebook fan pages, upload branded videos to YouTube, and launch corporate blogs. They are quick to chase the latest shiny “next thing” and just as quick to abandon it when another new thing comes along. At the end of the day, they've managed to check a number of boxes on their innovation checklist, while the grounds keep shifting under them. [P 155-157]
What does UNBC, or if you like, some component of the University (a club, the School of Business, Alumni Association, etc.) do to start a conversation? If you were a marketer for the University what initiatives would you take to “start a conversation?” How would you measure your success?
Option 2: E-mail Marketing
One of the most important parts of Search Engine Optimization is securing quality back-links – links to your own site from other, well ranked sites. When you start out, though, you will have to promote the site by telling other people on your own. Let's pretend that you are in charge of promoting the class blog.
Your first task is to choose a website that you think should link to our own. Explain why you are choosing that particular site.
Then, craft a carefully worded message you would use as an email to the author / administrator / webmaster for your target site. You can choose to showcase the entire site, or make a particular article the feature of the message. Keep in mind, you are hoping to eventually get a link from your target site.
The following guide for email marketing is taken from the course textbook:
“Always put new content in context before the user hits 'delete.' If your e-mail readers have no context for the message they are reading, your message equity is at risk. In other words, if you send an e-mail to Joe with fresh content and no mental notes for him to refer to (reminders of prior conversations, links, and so on) and Joe scrolls through the e-mail on his BlackBerry while boarding a train, your message equity has dropped to 33 percent or less.
"Conversely, if your message has associated notes (content callouts, links, or other information), you stand a much higher change of having your message resonate and be responded to by Joe.
“Link the e-mail's benefits to the reader's long-term goals. If your e-mail does not clearly and concisely state why the message will help the readers achieve their long-term goals and fulfill future needs, it is at high risk of having low comprehension. A good example might be, “Save this message for when you need to...”
"Creating language that is clear and concise, and conveys how your reader will benefit in the long run will pay off many times over.
“Leverage attention nodes. An attention node is some type of formatting in the e-mail that clearly grabs the reader's attention. In marketing messages, this is most commonly done with a callout box, action tag/button, or other imagery. In text for personal e-mail, attention nodes can be any creative use of spacing or character keys that helps clearly drive where the attention needs to placed. For example, you can use three asterisks (***) to signify importance." [P 148-149]
Option 3: Collaboration and decision making
“[eBay and Amazon] produce high volume and repeated transactions through interactive store fronts. Of the many things these companies do right, one of the most important is facilitating human judgment and decision making – a discipline in psychology that explains the underpinnings of making choices and taking action.
"One of the most interesting findings in human decision making is that people like to make decisions collaboratively. That is, they prefer making decisions with other people instead of by themselves … By permitting interactive collaboration, brands like eBay and Amazon keep customers moving toward their purchase decision. When the design of interactive storefronts parallels our natural decision making process, the e-commerce brand becomes the central source of decision-making input instead of a peripheral, transactional player. By playing a central role in the decision-making process, brands such as eBay and Amazon help us easily decide to repeatedly do business with them.” [P 130]
This passage deals with collaboration and decision making. Your task is to outline the decision making steps that prospective students take when choosing a university. What sites might they use in that process? Are those sites collaborative? How could a University take advantage of consumers' attraction to collaborative decision making?
Option 4: Make mine mobile Recall experiences you have had at colleges and universities that were frustrating, or procedures that were inefficient. This event could be anything, from registering for courses to buying a sandwich. How could the University or businesses operating therein make better use of mobile devices? Think about ways that mobile marketing or services could create reciprocal value: how could both the provider and consumer benefit? Here are some ideas to get you started:
“The mobile phone of today can be a light weight dedicated device for making and receiving hone calls or for performing rudimentary data service, such as accessing the Internet or sending text messages. On the other hand the mobile phone can be a full-featured, multipurpose, high-bandwidth, networked, multimodal, interactive information, communication and commerce tool. The former is commonly referred to as a traditional, or featured, mobile phone, and the latter is referred to as a smart phone.
"There is a third class of mobile device emerging – the dedicated terminal, such as the Apple iPod Touch, Sony PSP, net-book, and Amazon Kindle – which also needs to be kept in mind by the marketer. Each of these devices has some form of wireless connectivity, either WiFi or an embedded wireless broadband access card as in the case of the Kindle, that can support interactive marketing.” [P 98]
“Many consider the mobile channel as one big generic pipe, but this view is a misinformed generalization...the following is a brief definition of each path:
- SMS refers to short message service. This is also commonly known as text messaging, and is composed of an alphanumeric message consisting of 160 characters or less.
- MMS refers to multimedia messaging service … digital content, such as videos, pictures, and audio content via the mobile channel.
- E-mail refers to the delivery of email content through the mobile channel
- Voice refers to the voice channel of the phone.
- Internet refers to the ability of the mobile device to connect to the Internet for a widerange of data-enabled services, including the mobile Web, applications, content services like streaming video.
- Mobile Web refers to the experience of browsing the Internet via the mobile phone
- Bluetooth refers to the short-range Bluetooth radio channel, typically used to connect the phone with a wireless headset and related periphery devices, but it can also be used to deliver content to the mobile phone.
- Applications refer to software utilities and services downloaded to the mobile phone.”
[P115-116]
“Mobile marketing has been used to successfully engage consumers at every stage of the customer life cycle. Marketers can use mobile marketing to:
- Acquire new customers
- Increase and reward customer loyalty
- Generate brand awareness
- Monetize content
- Provide convenient, interactive customer service
- Drive attendance to live events and retail
- Promote products and services, often through couponing, sweepstakes and other promotions
- Create viral customer-to-customer brand reinforcement
- Facilitate cause-related marketing” [P 116]
What's missing from the Commerce course line-up at UNBC? Describe a topic (theoretical or applied) that you would like to see covered in ONE WEEK of classes? Give me a brief description of why you think it is interesting or important.
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