Tag Archives: Marketing

Reflection Time – COMM 296 Edition: An Interview with… Myself :)

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My Experience with the Marketing Plan Assignments…

Q: Hello Annie! It’s great being able to chat with you. Our readers would like to know about your experience with the Marketing Plan assignments and I have a couple of questions prepared for you. Let’s start with this one. What did you learn about teams, yourself, and marketing?

A: Hi there! Great chatting with you too! Well first off, I really enjoy working in teams. It allows us to leverage each person’s unique strengths to counter others’ potential weaknesses to create a well-balanced and efficient team. With myself, I am an adaptive individual and as such, I am fine working either in teams or independently. Of course, in team work, there’s still a component of independent work, where you work to reliably finish your own part by the agreed deadline. As I’ve realized, marketing might not be my forte, but the subject is definitely interesting. This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I used to think that marketing was all about advertising and creating ads. After taking Introduction to Marketing (COMM 296), it has cleared my terrible misconception. Although advertising is a part of marketing, it isn’t everything. Marketing is a very complex subject consisting of how to communicate value and benefits, positioning, strategies, branding, and many more. It’s definitely not something easy because, instead of standing from your own point of view (which we usually do), we have put ourselves in other people’s (consumers’) shoes and see the product the way they do.

Q: That’s very insightful and I positively agree that working in groups or individually has its respective benefits. This leads us to the next question. What skills did you enhance or develop, if any?

A: My teamwork skills would be one that I enhanced. I feel that teamwork is a skill that is continually improved upon because each team you work with consists of different people with different personalities and work styles.

Q: From what I understand, this course and the assignments have been quite beneficial to you. But, what would you do differently next time?

A: This is a tough question. Haha. Well, if I knew more about the final video project, I would’ve probably went to the library sooner to learn how to make a video and be able to be more of a help in the video editing part for my team.

Q: Video editing can be quite tough especially with the many programs available. I’ve learned so much from talking to you. Now, let’s wrap up this interview with this last question. Our readers would like to know what are your top takeaways?

A: Overall, I feel that marketing is a very relevant subject regardless of which option you choose at Sauder . Actually, more like it’s very relevant in life because for job searching in our extroverted world, you have to be able to stand out from the crowd. To achieve this, you have to sell yourself well by knowing who your employers (target segment or consumers) are, what kind of person (product) they are looking for, and then fit (position) yourself accordingly.

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With this, I bid adieu to Marketing for now.

“Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master.”
– Phil Kotler

(Sorry for the long post – Just trying to be creative.) 

In the name of fashion…

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A young women with heavy makeup and stilettos modelling a dress, that has a cutting that goes down to the waist, poses “seductively” in a high-end fashion magazine, like Vogue.

There’s nothing unusual about that.

But…

What if that model was just a 10-year old child?  Is it still alright for her to wear a dress that cuts down to the waist, even if she was posing for Vogue Enfants (Vogue Kids)? And under which circumstances would this be appropriate?

Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau is the child model I’m talking about and that was her photo shoot in Vogue Enfant, which brought up the issue of the “sexualisation of children in advertising and media”.

This issue affects children. Some children consider the models in fashion magazines to be their role model and when they see other children (same age) wearing makeup or wearing certain clothes, they want to fit in to their role model’s culture (visible artifact – behaviour, dress) by dressing like them. Even if the model doesn’t usually dress or look as he/ she does in magazines, viewers of the magazines are still under the impression that the look on the magazine is what is the accepted norm because not many people get to see what the model looks like on a daily basis.

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On the news, I hear about how the police has once again broken up another international child pornography ring, which the article has mentioned as  “one of the most pernicious ills of our era”, and the amount of people they arrested; but when a fashion magazine puts up pictures of children in seductive poses, I can’t help but wonder if these pictures are helping to fuel the sick fantasies of these people.

I believe that Vogue Enfants should consider the appropriateness of its advertised clothes for its target market (children and parents). Does persuading this group to buy clothes really need seductive poses?