Chapter 5 - Subliminal Advertising

Consumer behavior is the main topic discussed in chapter 5. When analyzing consumer behavior, market researchers aim toward revealing the process involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use, and dispose of goods & services to satisfy their needs. In turn, marketers often propose different strategies to help accelerate the consumer behavior process, either directly or indirectly. One form of indirectly activing consumer behavior is through subliminal advertising. Professor Featherman describes subliminal advertising as "hidden messages in vendor messages. these are messages that are not consciously received, but they still affect consumer decisions - such as hidden shapes in pictures, or perhaps the use of music or noises in TV ads." Take this into consideration, a videoclip of the show Iron Chef (linked provided at bottom of blog), shows gormet chefs competing to make the most ecsquisite meal. Sadly, most Iron Chef viewers are not expert chefs and even though they may be interested in preparing an extravagent meal, most of the time viewers will settle with any food in order to spark the hunger they feel from watching the show. Carefully watch the video and see if you notice any subliminal advertising. If you paid attention, around 44 seconds into the video the McDonald's logo flashes onto the screen. Descrete and simple, the logo alone may have been responsible for increased sales shortly after being aired on television. Broadcasting error? I think not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMzbwa6PvEE

Chapter 1 - Brands

In chapter 1, Professor Featherman briefs the reader on a few marketing basics before dividing into the rest of course. One of these basic topics included branding an the benefits of having a clear, recognizable brand. Featherman defines a brand as "a name, term, symbol that identifies one company's product(s) and sets it apart from their competition. The thing that turns a commodity into a specialty, and allows you to charge triple what the product is worth and 10x what it costs to make." In this picture, there are several popular brands that, no doubt, could be easily dechipered and linked to the companies they represent. Nike, McDonalds, Mercedes and Microsoft Windows have proved to have easily recognizable brands and its hard not to associate them with their corresponding companies, who (given their past success) can simply post their brand name and successfully market themselves without much effort.