Week 9: Identity & Branding

This week in class we talked about identity & branding and in the class blog Amanda brought up an excellent point - that we are surrounded by brand names that have been successfully marketed to us, such that when we think of any item we immediately associate the brand name and often substitute the brand name for the item (i.e. Kleenex, Xerox, and more recently Google). Just as the term Xerox went from merely a brand to also a verb, so did Google. No one says 'search for something on the internet' anymore...everyone just 'googles' it! Way to go Google and Xerox and Kleenex, etc. for getting their products to the tops of our minds.

On a related note...click here for a link to an article about an alternative method of finding out what people really think of different brands.

On an unrelated note yet related to a topic covered earlier in the semester, this morning on NPR I heard a segment with the VP of Campaigns for PETA. He and the interviewer were discussing the different advertisement strategies PETA has used over the years and their discussion was clearly an example of how PETA has utilized the two pathways to persuasion in their marketing. According to the conversation, several years ago PETA was taking more of an 'information-based' approach to their marketing strategy (read: central pathway). Now they are relying more on celebrity endorsements and less information packed ads (read: peripheral pathway). Their reasoning for this is that by using celebs (such as Pamela Anderson) they are trying to capture the attention of the masses of people who are interested in celebrities, specifically mentioned were frat guys.
However one caller made me realize an interesting dilemma when trying to negotiate between these two pathways. The caller mentioned that she was a supporter of PETA but made her feel less inclined to support the organization when she saw Pam Anderson advocating for them. The caller felt that this particular celeb is not a respected enough or does not invoke a positive enough image of the organization for her liking; she added that Pamela as a rep of PETA actually does more harm than good, in her opinion. This brings me to the dilemma I realized....when an organization is creating marketing messages and deciding which processing pathway to utilize in order to reach their target audience (ideally decided through the use of formative research!) they run the risk of alienating or turning off other segments of their audience that may process the information in a different way. Exhibited by the female caller who was more apt to identify with the PETA ads that required high involvement in the message processing, and who was less responsive and reacted negatively to the ads that capitalized on low involvement processing. Makes these decisions made by the big-wigs (or health educators) seems like more of a balancing act...how much do you want to capture Audience A, and is it worth the potential risk of losing Audience B? This could be a very involved dilemma but I bet the best answer is...more formative research!!