ITEM 1: VISUAL MODEL – MAX TWO PAGES (A4)
Create a one page visual model that shows the relationship between buyer behavior and marketing management decisions. You may use a second page for additional notes, tables or diagrams to help support and explain your visual model.
In class and in your preparation exercises, we have spent much time exploring the links between buyer behavior and different marketing practices. For example, a consumer’s need/want can be identified by qualitative marketing research and is addressed by the core product; their preferences for information search and the attributes of the market offering that are important to a market segment help frame the content and channel choices for marketing communications. Other links you will develop as your review your study notes and fill gaps in your tables and diagrams.
This portfolio item evolves from seminar preparation exercises starting in topic two. This portfolio item should be a development and extension of that work and should cover all topics. In your independent study, lectures and seminars you will have created both tables and diagrams that explore these links. Your visual model could be a table, diagram, or combination.
The visual model should fit on one page (but might include more than one element, such as two tables or a diagram and table). You can have an additional page for annotations and explanations that might not fit on the page with a model. For example, the flow through the different steps in a process is hard to show in a table, but easy to show in a diagram; details are easy to add to a table, but hard in a diagram. In both cases, you can use the page of annotations and explanations to compensate. You should include citations and bibliography (which are not included in the page or word counts).
Tables are easy to generate in a word processor. Diagrams are much harder. You are welcome to use any software you are familiar with, or draw a diagram by hand and take a photograph. You can format your visual model in portrait or landscape mode. The only restriction is that you must submit your portfolio in Word or PDF format, and as a single document.
You are encouraged to take the lessons from our buyer behavior classes and present your own model of buyer behavior that brings together insights from consumer and organizational buying. Use the notes page to include a short justification for the new model.
ITEM 2: SHORT WRITTEN ITEM ON ETHICS
This item will evaluate your understanding of the ethical concepts we study and your ability to apply them to the buyer behavior and/or marketing management practices you studied in topics one through seven.
Ethical issues cover all aspects of the module.
These include the choices buyers make in acting on their needs/wants, how they undertake their information search, the criteria they use select amongst different offerings, how they use, dispose of and undertake post-use evaluation. Similarly, marketers can include ethical criteria in the way they specify market offerings choose distribution partners, how they price and how they make marketing communications content and marketing communications channel decisions. As we saw, there are ethical dimensions to the collection and analysis of marketing research data.
Using an ethical issue of concern to you (or which you have read about in the news):
Analyze the issue from two or three different perspectives on ethics;
Make recommendations for how marketers could address the issue.
By perspectives on ethics, we mean the different ‘lenses’ you studied in the notes, textbook and journal article (for example, but not limited to, deontological and teleological ethics). By recommendations we mean considering decisions made during the marketing management process.
You may draw upon news sources for the ‘facts’ about your ethical case, but should not do other research (i.e., you must use the conceptual material from the reading list. Be sure to cite thoroughly and include a bibliography (neither count toward the word count).
You may of course use the ethical concerns and analysis your started during the topic eight seminar exercises.
You may write you essay in traditional form for use the script-writing method you practiced during the marketing research seminar preparation.
As with item one, every topic of the module provides insight into this task. As you draft your answer, it is a good chance to evaluate how well your item one visual model works to support the analysis and development of recommendations.
The word count should be ~1000 words. This does not include citations, bibliographic entries or headings.
ITEM 3: SHORT ESSAY EXTENDING ONE OF THE TOPICAL ISSUES
Our module has covered the full gamut of marketing management topics, and has used the marketing management process to integrate them. You have also in the final weeks explored some of the consequences of marketing management practice and the way that the material you have studied can help explain broader social and economic phenomena. This item is a chance for you to develop one of those topics in a little more depth.
The item has two parts. A media diary you will use as data to inform your analysis and an essay that draws together concepts from the module and uses the data to illustrate and evaluate them.
Media diary: Keep a media diary for a week, note the different types of content you consume (e.g., news, entertainment, study) and the devices (e.g., paper, broadcast TV, phone) and platforms you use to consume it (direct from the publisher, Instagram, etc). Note some of the adverts you see along the way.
Present this in a table form (choosing columns that work for you) as an appendix. The table will is not included in the word limit.
Short essay: Write an essay on the following:
Does your media media diary add support to, or undermine, the concepts you studied in the last weeks: e.g., attention economy (Terranova, 2012), echo chambers (Dubois and Blank, 2018), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019)? and
How do the different concepts you have studied throughout the module help explain what you found?
You have a template for your media diary in activities 6.5, 6.9, 6.10 and 9.7.
You will find item one of the portfolio (the visual model) invaluable in helping you identify relevant elements of the marketing management process to consider.
A note of caution: you will make two sets of inferences in your essay. The first is that your media habits and experiences are typical. The second is that your inferences about the management decisions are based on logic, not evidence1. Be sure to note this clearly to demonstrate your understanding of the limits of your conclusions (and for the benefit of the second markers and external examiners).
This item should be ~1000 words (not including your table of data, citations and bibliography).
An example from our discussion on pricing: we might have observed during the pandemic huge increases in the price of masks. Given our study of the module, we might infer that those rises could be because sellers’ estimates of the value to buyers has increased (suggesting they did value oriented pricing) and/or that the cost of the input materials rose because of scarcity (suggestion they did cost-oriented pricing) and/or that they observed increases in competitors’ prices. Logically, all are potential explanations, but we have no evidence of the thinking of the sellers so cannot be sure
MEDIA DIARY TEMPLATE
KEY QUESTIONS FOR MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS
There are three interrelated preparation activities for the class this week. The three exercises will help you develop your understanding to be able to better answer these questions.
The key 5 questions for this topic are:
1. What are alternative ways of thinking about human communications?
2. What effect might we want from marketing communications?
3. What methods can we use to create marketing communications content that has the desired effect?
4. What marketing communications channels do we have available?
5. How do we choose communications channels to deliver the message?
The last activity requires you to update your visual model to ensure it includes marketing communications.