Analyzing marketing messages

Each individual is exposed to hundreds of commercial messages on each day.  This enormous amount of marketing messages requires marketers to create messages that are clever, focused, and specific in their communication objectives.  The intent of this exercise is to allow students to choose a commercial message and critically analyze each of its components. This exercise provides students with an opportunity to apply the theoretical concepts of communication theory in a real world setting. In the mean time, students are able to realise the difficulty of the creating an effective message.

This assignment can be handed out post coverage of the Promotion Mix section of the course. Students are asked to select a marketing message of their choice for critical evaluation.  This message may be drawn from TV, radio, from the Internet or any other media source.  

The following assignment outline is furnished:

1.       Briefly describe the commercial of your choice.  The intent of this section is to give the reader a basic understanding of the various components of the commercial.  This explanation must communi­cate the gist of the commercial and be vivid in communicating the essential features to enable a critical analysis even if the reader has not viewed the message previously (10 points).

2.       Identify the target market.  Who is the marketer attempting to reach?  This involves developing a detailed description of the intended target market.  Identify the demographic and psycho­graphic components while you evaluate the target market in terms of its homogeneity within, heterogeneity between, substantiality, and operationalizability (10 points).

3.       Product strategy.  Every product should have something which makes it unique.  Customers buy benefits and not features. Identify the benefits the marketer is pro­viding for its target market. Also identify the values being offered to the intended target market:  functional value, social value, emotional value, or exper­iential value (20 points).

4.       Critique the message in terms of each element of the com­mun­i­ca­tion process, i.e., encoding, the message, the channel, the decoding, and the provision of a system for feedback.  This sec­tion represents the heart of your paper and I would reckon that you will expend the greatest amount of effort on this section (30 points).

Evaluate the signs, symbols, verbal cues, and non-verbal cues used to com­mun­i­cate the message.  Are these cues optimal in terms of targeting the identified market segment? What mechanisms has the marketer adopted to break through the clutter? 

5.      Message strategy.  On this section you are required to identify the marketers’ objective for the identified ad.  Does this ad provide information?  Serve as a reminder?  Attempt to add new attri­butes?  Build image?  Remember that a message may actually possess more than one objective.  What is the marketer's intended route to persuasion, the central or the peripheral route? (10 points).

6.      The last evaluative section actually examines the chosen message channel, i.e., was this advert on television, radio, or print. Was this channel selection optimal for the intended market? (10 points).