Advertising

The use of celebrity advertising as a means of marketing tactic in Nigeria’s business setting has increased significantly in the past few years. Celebrity advertising is fast becoming a common marketing/communication strategy in Nigeria. In today's world, the use of celebrity advertising for companies has become a trend and a perceived winning formula of corporate image building and product marketing.  This paper examined the use of celebrity for advertisement in promoting brand loyalty and purchase decision. Chivita juice (a Nigerian fruit juice manufacturing and marketing company) was used. A commercial and industrial locality, Agidingbi, in Ikeja Local Government, Lagos was studied. Survey method was adopted for the study. The data reveal that as high as 93.8% of the respondents are aware of the product. Many of the respondents are loyal to the consumption of Chivita. The result also reveals that usage of celebrity for Chivita advert has little effect on their buying decision. Taste and packaging also go a long way to influence their buying decision. The paper suggested that Companies must be cautious of the celebrities they select to help advertise their products and despite of the admirable qualities which the members of the public notice with the personality, advertisers should probe into the private life of the celebrity to ensure that the celebrity is actually qualified for use both physically and morally.

Key words: advertising, brand loyalty, celebrity advertising, endorsement

Marketing communications is the "promotion" part of the "marketing mix" or the "four Ps": price, place, promotion, and product. It can also refer to the strategy used by a company or individual to reach their target market through various types of communication.

In business is a form of marketing communication used to encourage, persuade, or manipulate an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to take or continue to take some action.

The trends of media consumption have undergone a structural change since the millennium. Television has kept its leading position, while radio and print media have lost some of their importance, and, most importantly, the internet has gained a huge amount of territory very quickly. Traditional media has not been able to answer the new challenge of interactivity posed by web 2.0. This has had a great impact on the advertising market, which is the most important income source for traditional media. Several companies worldwide have reformed their marketing budget and now spend a lot more for online advertising space. In general, the income of traditional media has decreased, although the amount of this decrease varies between different media. Simultaneously with these trends, overall ad-noise is increasing, which has generated a strong negative attitude in consumers. This should force advertisers to create quality advertisements and to find alternative and innovative ways to reach consumers. However, it seems that the advertising culture of Hungary has not begun to follow international trends that aim for improved quality and more effective advertisements instead of mass production.
Our aim was to discover the segments of advertising attitudes based on the online population of Hungary. This study consists the results of factor and cluster analysis. After processing the database, six final factors were established: “ad-liking”, “quality finding”, “ad awareness”, “neutrality”, “indifference” and “ad criticality”. The final clusters are “conservatives”, who spend the least time on internet; they generally prefer television. They think the most important ad element is information about healthy benefits, and most of them think packaging is very important. They don’t like the CG animations in contemporary advertisements. The “sensible advertising consumers” are active internet users who think that a good product also needs advertisement. They focus on the information provided by advertisements. “Quality seekers” are the most active internet users; they use the most advanced technical equipment. They have an inclination to innovation, and they are the cluster most aware of guerilla marketing methods. The “acceptors” think that advertisements could be used for social purposes. They state that advertisements do not influence their consuming decisions. They are average television and internet consumers. They are indecisive about new tendencies in marketing such as guerilla marketing methods.
Our conclusions are, in the curse of a deliberately planned advertisement designing, the relevant information about the certain product must be in focus. The pressing need for information among the clusters certifies it. This attitude among advertisers should appear during the change of media buying habits. According to this change, it is necessary for companies to launch a targeted online campaign. During a campaign like this, the segmentation of online population must be in focus, using the presented clusters. Thus, these different target groups become available with different, properly designed campaigns referring to their interests.

Seminar objectives

The seminar on ‘Building strong brands with structuralist rhetorical semiotics’ is intent on discussing crucial conceptual and methodological challenges that were faced while constructing a novel approach to brand equity planning. Brand equity constitutes the pinnacle of branding research and the hallmark of applied brand management. It is both a process and set of S.M.A.R.T objectives with regard to how strong brands may be built and maintained over time.  At the heart of brand equity lie brand associations. Brand associations have been amply theorized and operationalized in marketing research from a cognitive psychological point of view. However, the relationship between the diachronic deployment of a brand’s figurative language and its semantic nucleus has been unduly scrutinized. This seminar will display step-by-step how strong brands may be built and managed over time with the aid of structuralist rhetorical semiotics. By drawing on the conceptual construct of consumer-based brand equity, from a marketing literature point of view, and superior linguistic value, as its semiotic counterpart, the model of the brand trajectory of signification reinstates the time-hallowed generativist model that was initially put forward by Greimas and Courtés in a connectionist vein. The suggested 9-step methodological framework is intent on operationalizing the connectionist rendition of the trajectory of signification by adding dynamism to the morphologically and syntactically distinctive components of the trajectory. The suggested methodological framework focuses on the strength and uniqueness of brand associations as integral aspects of a brand’s equity structure and comprises a set of calculi that aim at addressing from a brand textuality point of view how associations may be systematically linked to their key sources with an emphasis on the ad filmic text. The framework draws on two pillars, interpretative semiotic analysis and content analysis. The qualitative research design is facilitated by quantitative analysis techniques, also featuring multivariate mapping, with view to adding rigour to the process of pattern generation, in quest for sources of differential figurative advantages, but also of modes of co-variation among semic and figurative elements of brand discourses. The benefits of adopting a brand textuality perspective in brand equity planning will be highlighted in line with the conceptual/methodological framework that underpins the connectionist approach to the brand trajectory of signification.

Indicative references

George Rossolatos (2014a). Brand equity planning with structuralist rhetorical semiotics. Kassel: Kassel University Press.
George Rossolatos (2014b). A methodological framework for projecting brand equity: Putting back the imaginary into brand knowledge structures. Sign System Studies 42(1): 98-136.
George Rossolatos (2014c). Exploring the rhetorical semiotic brand image structure of ad films with multivariate mapping techniques. Semiotica Vol.200: 335-358.

You may view and download the presentation @

http://www.slideshare.net/grossolatos/george-rossolatos-building-strong-brands-with-structuralist-rhetorical-semiotics-new-bulgaria-university-19-9-2014

Este artigo tem o objetivo de refletir sobre os festivais, de modo geral, e o Festival de Publicidade de Cannes, especificamente, enquanto espaço de recepção e instância de consagração do campo. A partir da articulação de conceitos de Roger Odin e Pierre Bourdieu, parte-se da hipótese de que existe uma relação entre os modos de produção de sentido mobilizados pelos filmes publicitários neste contexto, e os critérios de valoração em jogo neste lugar. O objetivo deste artigo é refletir sobre estes pontos de contato e demonstrar a possibilidade de articulação das duas perspectivas através da análise da recepção do filme Carousel.

Este artigo tem como objetivo assinalar os aspectos específicos do
comercial televisivo, e sugerir, a partir de uma perspectiva imanente, uma
abordagem metodológica que dê conta da relação entre sua dimensão fílmica e a dimensão promocional. Com o objetivo de demonstrar o funcionamento da abordagem proposta, analisamos o comercial Always a Woman, da marca Jonh Lewis.

Advertising is currently the main source of income for digital media. The crusade by big media organizations to establish pay walls, in various forms, is not inconsistent with the fact that digital advertising is the main source of income for media outlets in the virtual environment. For media organizations it is useful to know the typology of digital advertising. This improves business strategies, including those that combine digital and paper versions. The Research Group on Digital Journalism and Broadband has conducted an empirical study of the Spanish digital journals, based on the digital versions of the mass-readership newspapers, El Mundo and El País. We found a high
number of advertisements, the predominant forms being banners and box ads.