As London is preparing for the Olympics, the amount of high sugar foods (and drinks) that claim links with the games seems to grow exponentially. From Mark Ronsons “The Beat“ Olympic song (thanks to a fizzy drink, note: it’s the original, red, full sugar version featured in the video!), the golden arches sponsoring the games itself - and jumping onto the bandwagon of the sport and fitness movement is Cadbury - another Olympic sponsor proudly announcing that the Stripes vs Spots campaign made 900.000 people participate. And in Germany, Erdinger Beer (in small print: the alcohol free version) is even proudly marketing itself as an isotonic, regeneration drink for sports(wo)men.
Well - let’s face the facts: neither of these brands can claim convincingly healthy products - in fact, it’s all too similar to the familiar “greenwashing” technique used to market anything from airplanes to cars as “environmentally friendly”. I wonder if it isn’t time to honour their attempt to sell unhealthy foods by linking them to healthy activities in a similar vain: Let’s call it fitwashing.
Posted in Various.
Tagged with Branding, Fitwashing, Sports, Unhealthy Foods.
Developing the ideas from the last post about the use of stereotypes in advertising (and marketing) further, the effect of using stereotypes in advertising is an interesting (and also controversial) topic. In the last post, I mainly referred to the effect of using stereotypes - but what happens to consumers when they see the stereotypes? What effects (apart from rapid information transmission) does the use of stereotypes have?
Linking two theories from social psychology, and proving their applicability to advertising, Qualls & Moore (1990) examined what happens to people evaluating advertising portraying people who are similar and who are different than they are - going beyond the simple ideas of Identification Theory (discussed here earlier).
Qualls & Moore combined In-Group Bias Theory (Brewer, 1979), which, in a somewhat similar idea to Identification Theory, proposes that people perceived as “in-group” are perceived more favourably than people perceived as “out-group”; i.e. people of any particular ethnic (or other) background are likely to respond more favourably to images of people depicting other people with a similar background. Further, Polarised Appraisal Theory (Linville, 1982) shows that people who are perceived as “in-group” are evaluated more moderately (because of a greater number of possible comparators resulting in a more complex cognitive schema for evaluation), while people who are perceived as “out-group” are likely to be evaluated in more extreme ways. I.e. this theory states that if someone, for example an actor in an advertisement, is perceived as “out-group”, the person is likely to be perceived much more extremely (both positively or negatively!) than if the person is perceived as “in-group”.
To test their applicability to marketing communications, Qualls & Moore compared responses of black and white people to black and white actors in advertisements respectively. They found that in-group members will evaluate other in-group members more favourably than they will out-group members, i.e. black respondents favoured black actors in advertisements - and vice versa.
However, they found no support for polarised appraisal, i.e. advertisements featuring “out-group” actors were not evaluated more extremely than “in-group” actors. The latter finding was a surprise, as Linville previously showed the relevance of Polarised Appraisal Theory to both racial and age related stereotypes.
Further, Qualls & Moore did find that their respondents had (as predicted) more complex cognitive schemata for “in-group” actors - but those did not result in extreme evaluations when it came to advertising. Thus, it may be that not all “real world” stereotypes may be directly transferable: i.e. it could be that people are likely to make more extreme evaluations in a “real life scenario” - but would not do so in a scenario that is not “real”. Another important issue when considering the implications is that stereotypes may have changed: the research into these is very dated (over twenty years old!). It would be interesting to see how the cognitive schemas have changed. I’d think that in a world with much more interaction between different groups, it is likely that most people have more complex cognitive schemas about “others” than in the 1990s?!
Posted in Advertising & Marketing Theory.
Tagged with Identification Theory, In-Group Bias Theory, Marketing Communications, Polarised Appraisal Theory, Stereotypes.
Often advertising is being criticised for portraying stereotypes - and although advertisers have somewhat toned down especially the use of gender stereotypes, stereotypes of all sorts can frequently be found in advertising.
This is because marketers like to use “social categorisation” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Social categorisation means that people organise information into simplified categories, which includes people we have little information about. Thus, salient characteristics help to form a mental image of the person, and guide behaviour towards the person. See the example of the mini-advert on the right - where a woman (stereotype: “not technologically advanced”) depicts the ease of driving a mini. Similar uses can be found in many international adverts - for example for French perfumes in Asia where all that is said is a tagline in French (thus evoking the social stereotypes of style, luxury etc), or the classic Audi advertising in Britain which used “Vorsprung durch Technik” (thus evoking German stereotypes of advanced engineering etc).
While the use of stereotypes clearly helps to convey some messages in a more rapid form by playing on preconditioned ideas, more contemporary research, particular when it comes to ethnic stereotypes are more nuanced. For example, Hugenberg & Sacco (2008) show that while social categorisation still holds in principle, it is mostly effective when portraying stereotypes related to another group (i.e. someone the target audience does not identify with, or have little experience with). Thus, selling a Mini to women with the advertisement above is unlikely to be very successful (especially if the woman’s self-image is that she is just as savvy when it comes to driving as man). Further, using stereotypes in a globalising world may themselves become ineffective - as more and more people have in-depth experiences of “others”, and are less likely to easily categorise information into simple categories.
Posted in International Marketing Theory.
Tagged with International Marketing, Marketing Communications, Social Categorisation, Stereotypes.
As suggested in some of the comments on the Mendely / iPad post a week ago, I also took a look at Papers2 for the Mac (with a beta version available for PC) as a way of organising papers and optimising the workflow of reading them.
First-off, the good stuff: Papers is a “native” Mac application - and as you would expect, it is simply gorgeous - both on the iPad and on the Mac.
On the iPad takes advantage of the retina display of the new iPad - so the pixelated view you can get in Goodreader until they update is replaced by crisp and sharp letters.
I understand there are a lot of fans of Papers out there - but I have to admit I was a quite disappointed (maybe those who like it can tell me what I’m missing). Firstly, on the Mac it lacks the function to sync across different machines - I find that is a pretty serious flaw. Further, and maybe more specific to me(?), I had to delete the preferences (a tip I found in the support forums) and attempt to sync several times before it synced with my iPad. Before doing that, it refused to sync papers between the Mac and the iPad. Once I got that sorted - it seemed to work well though - and synced automatically when launching Papers on the iPad.
As you’d expect, papers let’s you highlight and add notes to PDF files - both on the Mac and iPad. However, it’s lacking the ability to write onto the PDF, something I find very useful (as notes don’t print well). A somewhat strange omission on the iPad is the ability to mark a paper as read (you can only do this on the main computer). This means, the paper you have read on the iPad remains marked as “new” until you select it on the main computer - and even then it does not appear in the “Recently Read” folder on the iPad. The iPad version can import from iDisk (but not iCloud?) and Dropbox - but does not offer a sync facility. A nice addition though, not available via Goodreader and Mendeley is to have a separate ”note” attached to a paper - which also syncs.
On the Mac, Papers also offers the ability to insert citations into virtually all documents. That is quite good - and the cross-application flexibility definitely a plus over free competitors such as Zotero or Mendeley. However (again!), Papers does not offer the ability to edit the citation after inserting it (such as both Mendeley and Zotero) or supress the author (as Zotero can), if you write sentences like Miller (1993) said….
All in all, I think Papers looks great, and is very nice to work with (and probably a lot less “techie” than the Mendely->Sugarsync->Goodreader solution). But, it is lacking some essential features to be really useful beyond a (quite expensive) way of syncing papers to the iPad (but remember no “marked as read” function). If you are a pure Mac & iPad user - and only work on one machine - then this is probably a good programme. But, with a licence costing €70.21 (incl. of VAT) for the computer version and £6.99 for the iPad version - I’d have expected more functionality than what the software delivered, especially syncing between computers and more annotation features.
Posted in Various.
Tagged with Annotate, iPad, Mac, Papers, PDF.
Maredo, Germany’s largest steak house chain, was forced to publicly ”apologise” this week for an allegedly homophobic advert, dating back several years - and which Maredo never used - or in fact (directly) commissioned .
The controversy was caused by an advert created in 2008 as part of a competition initiated by Maredo. The advertisement showed a steak with the words “tofu is gay meat” (an image is available here), which was shown as part of an exhibition of especially creative advertising concepts in 2009. Unfortunately, the advert went viral earlier this month - and even though it was never used, or, as Maredo points out comissioned by the brand, the advert has created a backslash against the steak house chain in the social media world. Maredo has swiftly distanced itself from the advertising (and passed the blame to the agency that created the advert). However, if you do a twitter search on Maredo, there is still a substantial amount of negative tweeting going on about Maredo.
The case is interesting as using competitions has become an increasingly common way of sourcing creative ideas: While in this case the advertisement was made by an established agency - in many cases, companies try to crowd-source creative ideas for their campaigns. From Peperami (see the ad here), to Dorito, from MasterCard to Camel Cigarettes - big brands have crowd-sourced campaigns. Of course, so far companies (still) had the last say in what made it to the finals - but, did they have a say what happened to the artworks after? Take a look at YouTube to see just how many advert spoofs are available. And A LOT of them are definitely not exactly for the faint hearted. Of course, most are recognisable as not the real thing - but it opens the question: who owns the brand? Who creates the brand values? Marketers would love to think it is them who can create brand images in the consumers mind - but then how come people confused the Maredo advert, and assumed it was a “real advert”? Could it be that the real lesson from the “Tofugate” (as it was dubbed in German) is, that the brand is made by the consumers - and what consumers associate as authentic is the brand message - no matter what brand owners think? After all, why don’t consumers think that most of the “priceless” ads on YouTube are authentic when they claim that sexual favours are priceless - but so many consumers assumed that “Tofu is Gay Meat” was a real slogan?
Posted in Marketing Communications, Social Media Marketing.
Tagged with Brand Image, Crowdsourcing, Marketing Communications, Social Media Marketing, User Generated Content.
Early in the 1960s, Identification Theory emerged (Kehlman, 1961) as a way of explaining how persuasion is linked to perceptions of similarity. Put simply, Identification Theory states that when people judge a message source to be similar to them, then this source has greater persuasive influence. This is, as Kehlman points out, because consumers (or people in general) attempt to satisfy their “self-defining” relationship with others, i.e. live up to their own “self-image” by anchoring what they do, say or think based on the influence of others they perceive as similar (this is largely similar to the idea of peer-groups as influencers).
The way this influence works by “classical” identification, where the person either perceives similarity between the influencer - or aspires to be like the influencer. For example, by when watching an advert featuring someone who is a successful teacher, this may influence teachers (and aspiring teachers ) more than someone who is a bank clark.
A different form of identification happens where the receiver and sender of a message are in a reciprocal relationship, i.e. they both identify their own self-images through the relationship of the other person. For example, a mother is reliant on a child for her self-image as a mother - thus identification with her role as mother (and therefore persuasion) can occur as a consequence not only of seeing an other mother (that would be classical identification) but also by seeing a child.
Lastly, people can be influenced by group relationships, i.e. seeing a group one does, or wants to belong to.
Identification theory can be found in manifold examples in marketing campaigns. For example, “slice of life” style advertising often uses identification elements. Similarly, advertising campaigns using ethnically diverse consumers (or indeed consumers which are “targeted” but not diverse) are further examples. Identification theory also is the basic argument for localised marketing campaigns in an international marketing context, as “local” consumers (according to the theory) are more likely to identify with identifiable “local” spokespersons.
However, while identification is an important point - it is only one aspect of persuasion in an international context, and other forms of persuasion are equally possible…. stay tuned for more ( for example by subscribing to the blog feed in your favourite RSS reader: click here to access the feed)
Posted in Advertising & Marketing Theory, International Marketing Theory.
Tagged with Identification Theory, International Marketing, Marketing Communications, Persuasion.
While yesterdays post was very much related to postacculturation, i.e. taking a contemporary look at how within a globalised world consumers create identity, todays post goes “back to the roots” by looking at acculturation - or the change that occurs to both when two cultures come into contact (i.e. the meltiong pot paradigm). Researchers during the 1930s to the 1980s have attempted to explain what happens by relying largely on diffusion models, i.e. focusing on how certain attitudes, concepts etc. change as a result of cross-cultural contact.
A dominant paradigm is Acculturation Theory, proposed by Berry in the 1980s, explains how individuals from a a cultural background react when in contact with another culture (mostly in the context of immigration). The theory posits that, depending on how these individuals react to the “host” culture and how much of their “home” culture they retain, individuals will either integrate, assimilate, reject or become marginalised. From a marketing perspective, we can see examples of all four categories occurring in contemporary (marketing) communications: For example, integration can be seen in the case of global celebrities endorsing local products, merging both home and host culture. Similarly, assimilation can be seen in contemporary communication where “culturally others” have become completely integrated (or assimilated) into their host culture; relinquishing their “home culture”. For a comical version of this, check out this Goodness Gracious Me sketch for example.
A typical example of “rejection” directed marketing can be seen in advertising directed specifically at certain groups, emphasising ”home” culture. Examples can be found on television stations specifically targeting certain ethnic groups, which link consumption of particular goods to cultural origin.
Lastly, “marginalisation” targeted advertisements are typically adverts that are culture free, pan-national advertisements.
While Acculturation Theory is useful for explaining consumer behaviour, attitudes of consumers and marketing towards ethnically diverse consumers, it has also been heavily criticised. For example, the categories are seen as too fixed - and personalities in real life may be more fluid than the theory suggests. Further, against a backdrop of globalisation of markets and consumption, many academics have started to highlight the role of the consumer in shaping their own culture - as discussed in the previous post, often “oscillating” between local and global products and “home” and “host” concepts becoming increasingly obsolete.
Posted in International Marketing Theory.
Tagged with Acculturation Theory, Culture, Globalisation, International Marketing.
While it is undeniable that globalisation of markets has occurred on a rapid scale, with global brands being represented on all corners of the globe, the importance for marketing communication - and indeed the idea that we can “sell to the world” with one message remains more contested.
Culture, is the “collective programming of the mind” (Hofstede, 1980), and the level of influence remains a hotly contested topic. For example, Walter (1995) argued that culture will never become globalised, but that does not, of course mean that there is no globalisation in terms of cultural convergence. Many scholars point to increasingly global market segments, and that consumers value “global brands” (Holt, Quelch & Taylor, 2005). Of course, on the other side, many would argue that although there are global brands, the way these brands operate in different markets are unique to the market (for example, Mid-Autumn Festival Chocolate sold in Asia by Belgian chocolate maker Godiva, Brooks Brothers of the US selling “Year of the Dragon” shirts in China etc…). Within marketing, coming from a postmodern angle, CCT or Consumer Culture Theory (Arnould & Thompson, 2005) has become a set of conceptual perspectives offering a framework for studying the interaction of consumers and markets, and co-creation of meaning, which has embraced the notion of global consumption. CCT particularly focuses on four types of “meaning creation” in markets:
1. Consumer Identity Projects - examines how consumers use marketing materials (or marketing meanings) to construct a coherent, though often diverse and fragmented “self”. In other words, consumers use the market to construct their own identities, consuming goods in order to express their own desires and feelings. In this sense, for consumers active in the market, consuming Belgian chocolate (even at or especially during a traditional Asian festival) becomes a way to express yearning for quality, internationalisation or perceived sophistication or modernity.
2. Market Place Culture Perspectives - stresses the importance of the the consumers as the active creators - and not passive bearers like anthropologists would argue- of culture. This means that “culture” is what the consumers in individual markets make: i.e. they co-create their culture by consuming meaning bearing goods. The idea of neotribalism, where consumers form “brand tribes”, is an example of this.
3. Sociohistoric Patterning of Consumption - addresses the question “what is consumer society and how is it constituted and sustained?” (Arnould & Thompson, 2005, p.874) . This perspective offers interesting insights into how, for example, ethnic origins have become something “consumable” and acts as anchor in a fluid consumption environment (Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard 2005)
4. Mass-Mediated Marketplace Ideologies and Consumers’ Interpretive Strategies - attempts to answer how consumers make sense of mass-media messages related to consumption and formulate (critical) responses, i.e. embrace or reject received messages.
While CCT does not either reject - or confirm, globalisation as seen by scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, CCT offers insights into the marketplace behaviour of consumers creating meaning within a world of globalised consumer products. It also has highlighted global connections, where consumption patterns and meanings created by the consumption take a global role shared by individuals, or are used to distinguish individuals or groups by constructing distinct identities of the self through consumption.
Posted in International Marketing Theory.
Tagged with Culture, Global Consumer Culture Theory, Globalisation, International Marketing.
I’m a big fan of Mendeley, the free reference and paper manager, available for both PC and Mac. One of the great advantages of Mendeley is that it happily keeps my work PC and my Mac at home in sync. Unfortunately though, while there is an iPad Mendeley “Lite” version, the iPad version does not (yet) allow you to annotate PDFs. And let’s face it - annotating is an important feature when reading papers!
I therefore rely on a different reader for the iPad, which syncs with my Mendeley library on the Mac/PC - and syncs it via Sugarsync (you could, of course use Dropbox, too - but Sugarsync gives you 5GB for free, Dropbox only 2GB)
The way I have set up the sync is as follows:
In the Sugarsync application, I’ve selected the Mendeley library folder as a synced folder (by default, on a Mac, this is located in “username > Documents > Mendeley Desktop”).
Once synced to Sugarsync, I downloaded the Goodreader app for iPad. It’s not a free PDF reader - but modestly priced at £2.99.
In Goodreader I added syncing with Sugarsync by tapping on “Connect to Servers” and adding Sugarsync from the box that appears. After filling out the account details, Goodreader asks you to located the folder(s) to sync (in my case “Mendeley Desktop”).
Once linked, Goodreader will download all of the papers from Mendeley.
The papers can then be read “on the go”, annotated etc…
After reading/annotating or after adding new papers, simply remember to click sync and Goodreader/Sugarsync will nicely keep the Mendely Library updated with the annotated versions of the files.
The result is that once I have a new paper, I just add it to Mendeley - and I can then take it with me on the iPad and annotate on the go.
Posted in Various.
Tagged with Annotate, iPad, Mendeley, Sugarsync.
As London is preparing for the Olympics, the amount of high sugar foods (and drinks) that claim links with the games seems to grow exponentially. From Mark Ronsons “The Beat“ Olympic song (thanks to a fizzy drink, note: it’s the original, red, full sugar version featured in the video!), the golden arches sponsoring the games itself - and jumping onto the bandwagon of the sport and fitness movement is Cadbury - another Olympic sponsor proudly announcing that the Stripes vs Spots campaign made 900.000 people participate. And in Germany, Erdinger Beer (in small print: the alcohol free version) is even proudly marketing itself as an isotonic, regeneration drink for sports(wo)men.
Well - let’s face the facts: neither of these brands can claim convincingly healthy products - in fact, it’s all too similar to the familiar “greenwashing” technique used to market anything from airplanes to cars as “environmentally friendly”. I wonder if it isn’t time to honour their attempt to sell unhealthy foods by linking them to healthy activities in a similar vain: Let’s call it fitwashing.
Working with iPad, Word Documents & Comments
The biggest issue is that Word on the “normal” computer has a the track changes/comment function, which is not available on the iPad as such. Therefore, I was trying to find a substitute - which unfortunately is a bit more tricky than I thought!
From the usual apps I use, Goodreader can open Word documents (.doc/.docx) to read on the go. As I use Goodreader with Sugarsync to read and annotate papers, this was my first choice… However, while Goodreader can open the documents, it can’t annotate the document. This makes it effectively “read only” - which really is not helpful at all for giving feedback “in the document”. Also, while Goodreader displayed most of the large documents I tried this out with just fine (including images), colour highlights in the original document get lost - so you may miss important points.
Documents to Go is another, pretty pricey, app for opening, reading - and working on documents from the office suite (amongst others). It allows to alter the text, highlight parts of the document - though not tracking changes. As a plus point: colour highlights in the original document remain. However, with large documents, the app becomes very slow… and I mean VERY slow, making it burdensome because to work on a document - often becoming unresponsive. Definitely not a good choice!
The worst performer for reading/changing Word-files was surprisingly Apple’s own Pages. A beautiful programme when it works - but it definitely decided that it did not like large docx files. So it crashed when opening large documents … not a good starting point!
So - what is my solution? Well - there are two options:
First: I found the most reliable way of reading Word documents is to convert them into PDF files (this is pretty straightforward on a Mac: Just click File, Print, Save as PDF). The PDF can then be transferred by saving it them to Sugarsync or Dropbox, in the same way as described here. Alternatively, you could email the PDF to yourself, and then open it on the iPad in Goodreader. This ensures all highlights, formatting etc are kept in place as much as possible. You can then open them in Goodreader for reading on the go - annotate the PDF, and send the annotated file back as feedback.
Another option is using iAnnotate: By default, iAnnotate doesn’t open .doc/.docx files. You need to enable this feature in Settings - Advanced - “Experimental settings”. It takes quite a few moments to open files - BUT - once opened you can annotate the doc(x) files just like a normal PDF. It also looses highlights in the original document. When finished, the file with the annotations can be sent via email, however, be aware that it will be sent as a PDF file. Thus, the result is pretty much the same as converting the original file to a PDF first, but loosing the highlights.
If you have any more suggestions, more convenient way of reading while on the go, please get in touch by using the comments below - or via twitter @stephx! Thanks!
Posted in Various. Tagged with Annotate, Comments, Documents, Dropbox, iPad, Sugarsync, Word.
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