Month: January 2013

In the James Bond movie, “Die Another Day” in 2002, there’s one really cool gadget used by James Bond to destroy the entire enemy base, the invisible car. It was so cool that everyone dreamed to own one of those bad boys.

However, so many years after, the dreams aren’t fulfilled in anyways. Honestly, I was disappointed until I saw this advertisement on youtube. Please watch this youtube video before continuing reading this blog. LINK.

Pretty cool, huh?? Yay, transparent cars actually exist. Oh, nevermind, it was just an advertisement for their new line of cars by Mercedes Benz, “F-CELL”, featuring the use of hydrogen cell, which is the legendary alternative energy source for cars. So why did they have this transparent cars advertisement? How is the advertisement related to their products? Transparent cars… first thing comes to my mind would of course be excitement, which makes me to look up this company, and especially for this transparent car. While I’m doing that, “F-CELL” keeps appearing in every blog post, websites, or anything that talks about this transparent car, and yet, “F-CELL” is what this advertisement all about. I guess the advertisement works pretty well, at least now, I know quite a lot about this “F-CELL” unintentionally when I am only trying to do more research about this transparent car.

Second thing comes to my mind, hydrogen cell, it’s a standard answer for my high school science projects. “How to save the earth? Hydrogen cell”, “How to be cost effective? Hydrogen cell”. Unfortunately, not many know what a hydrogen cell is, and what are its advantages. I think this advertisement actually does a really good job about conveying the advantages of hydrogen cell to its potential customers, or even the general public. The car is transparent, which means it does not exist, in other words, the car doesn’t produce any noise, pollution, smell, thus it would be so environmental friendly that its existent would not affect this world as if it dosen’t exist. And yet, no pollution and low noise and no smell are the key benefits of adopting hydrogen cells as the main energy source to function a car.

Even though the transparent car in this advertisement is just a rare one, the advertisement did a really good job to attract peoples’ attention towards a new line of Mercedez Benz cars, and yet it’s secretly convey the goodness of the feature of this car, hydrogen cell. This is a really successful advertisement in my point of view.

Source:

Advertisement video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To0sSJKqeEk

“Die Another Day” photo: http://vadakkus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/aston_martin_inviz.jpg

Mercedes Benz advertisement photo: http://i.imgur.com/5wEsa.jpg

” McDonald’s which is a major franchise restaurant worldwide has lured millions of children into eating at their restaurant, by supplying a free venue for birthday parties and an outdoor area with a children’s playground. This can create an image of “if you want a happy time, go to McDonalds”. They also have their name on some of the educational products such as stationery and programs on computers used in primary schools. This encourages young children to want to eat McDonald’s which is a very unhealthy fast food, and as it is a part of the schooling environment, children think that this has the approval of the education department. This could lead to poor food choices in later life.

Today many soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi try to cover up the fact that their soft drink is extremely unhealthy, by creating new no sugar soft drinks to promote the fact that there is no sugar in their drinks.  So instead of putting sugar into their drinks they use artificial sweeteners to make it have that same taste as the original drink. This makes the advertisement of these new “no sugar soft drinks” misleading and therefore unethical. It really confuses the issue that artificial sweeteners are also related to health problems. ”

The above 2 companies obviously violates the ethics in a way that they choose to ignore the health of their consumers. However, on the other side of their marketing campaign is all about sports, charity, or anything that gives general companies a positive image. Why would they even do that? Are they begging for forgiveness? I do not think so. If they want forgiveness, why would these companies continue to market their products years and years? 2012 is not the first year that their products are complained to be unhealthy. What happen if they do stop advertising, stop all the marketing campaigns? I guess people would still go for Mcdonalds when they are hungry, or drink Coke when they are thirsty or craving some sweetness. These events would definitely happen, so why are people concerned with the ethics of Mcdonald’s and Coke’s marketing strategies? People are still going to have consume them even without their advertisements! In other words, consumers are the ones who choose what they want even the marketing strategies are unethical. Thus, I am confused about the importants of ethics in marketing. It seems not as important as the ethics in other industry. I guess I am wrong, hopefully, I have a clear mind about it after the lesson about ethics

Source:

“Ethical & Unethical Marketing”

Image Source:

“McDonald’s Birthday Party”