Promotion, Advertising Agencies and the Media: Promoting Biz/Ed

Promotion, Advertising Agencies and the Media: Promoting Biz/ed

This resource is designed specifically for Unit 3 of the Edexcel BTEC qualification, 'Creative Product Promotion'.

Aim

This resource is designed to give you a practical understanding of business decision making within the context of promotion. The example given is real and on-going. You will be asked to consider different ways of promoting the Biz/ed service. To understand the implications of this, you will be given some background information about Biz/ed, where it has come from, where it hopes to go and some of the issues we have to think about in promoting the service.

The Background

Biz/ed is a service providing learning materials to students and teachers/lecturers in business studies and economics and related subjects. The service is based at the University of Bristol in the Institute for Learning and Research Technology.

The service began in 1996 and in its early days built up sets of notes and worksheets for the Web. Larger scale projects like the Virtual Economy, Virtual Developing Country and the Virtual Factory were one off projects developed and funded in conjunction with other partner groups like the Institute of Fiscal Studies in the case of the Virtual Economy, and Cameron Balloons in the case of the Virtual Factory.

The body responsible for funding Biz/ed

Other projects like TimeWeb (a resource developed to build understanding of the use of data) were also funded as one-off projects. Without regular funding, however, the service had a limited life span. In 2002, negotiations took place to get service funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a branch of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The initial funding was for a three year period from July 2002 - July 2005. The security that this funding brought allowed Biz/ed to plan ahead and develop a strategy for its future resource development.

Image: A screenshot of the TimeWeb resource

The strategy was to provide learning resources in the shape of lesson plans for educators and students teaching AS and A2 business studies and economics and AVCE business. (The term 'educators' is used because both teachers and lecturers use our site and it was felt the one term covered them both.) In addition, Biz/ed looked to identify where it might be able to provide resources that targeted the Higher Education market. At this point, it was not within the funding remit to provide resources for GCSE. Contact with Further Education (FE) colleges suggested that there was also a growing demand for BTEC business and travel and tourism courses, so in September 2004, a new series of resources was planned to cater for this need.

In addition to the normal resources mentioned above, work was being carried out on a series of larger scale, more technically demanding resources. These resources would and will be more interactive. External authors have also been recruited to write in other areas of specialism like accounts.

Decisions about the future direction of Biz/ed were also important. Plans were made to seek further funding from the JISC beyond 2005, but also to investigate ways in which Biz/ed could secure some independent revenue streams. Promoting Biz/ed is, therefore, an important aspect in the work of those on the service. Some promotion is carried out through workshops where training is given in maximising the opportunities Biz/ed can provide.

The team currently consists of five people - a project manager, senior technical researcher, content editor and two content developers. Biz/ed has now to think carefully about its future direction and the methods it will use to promote what it does.

You are to assume that Biz/ed has received some additional funding from the JISC but needs to find a way of generating some revenue streams to help support what it does. The team are all keen to ensure that Biz/ed remains as much a free service as it currently is.

Your Task

Look at the range of resources available on the Biz/ed site. Prepare a 600 word report that outlines what you would advise the Biz/ed team to do to promote the service more effectively in the future.

In carrying out your investigation and report you will need to consider the following points along with others which you may be able to come up with yourself.

·  What type of business is Biz/ed?

·  Why would we want to be promoted?

·  Who is our audience?

·  How do we know who our audience are?

·  Should we be more specific in who we target, i.e. is it students, teachers, lecturers, schools, FE, HE, corporate users, professional bodies?

·  What are we providing?

·  How could we promote our product/service?

·  How could we sell our service?

·  How much would we charge?

·  If a charge was set would it cause difficulties given that the service has always been 'free' to the user?

Advertising and Advertising Agencies

In addition to the promotion work, Biz/ed also has to consider the advertising angle of promotion. One aspect of that is the production of posters and leaflets that are sent to schools, colleges and universities. Biz/ed was getting to the stage where the supply of its previous posters were running out. Biz/ed needed to come up with some new posters that not only reflected what it was doing now but also what it intended to do in the future. The team spent some time generating the new posters to help advertise the service.

The outline below gives you some idea about how we went about the process and the things we tried to consider in the development of the new posters. Such a process is not that different to the methods used by business organisations in all walks of life - in some cases the budget is significantly larger but many of the same decisions and processes need to be gone through in exactly the same way.

·  How should we go about producing the posters - do it ourselves, use our previous agency or use a new one?

·  What are the benefits of using an advertising agency?

·  What did the ad people do for us that we could not have done ourselves?

·  What factors did we have to consider when designing and producing our new posters?

·  What message were we trying to get across?

·  How effective are our new posters in promoting us?

·  What about timing - when should we have had them ready for and why?

·  How effective are they in raising the Biz/ed profile?

·  Should we have considered using other media? TV, radio? If so why, if not, why not?

·  Should we have a local, regional, national or international focus to our advertising?

·  What about the selection of images, colours, etc. that were to be used in the posters?

·  What considerations and sensitivities would we have had to think about in this respect?

·  To what extent are cost considerations important for a service like Biz/ed?

·  How would we measure the cost-effectiveness of the new posters?

The following provides an outline of how agencies' approach the design process - it's important that they give it a tight structure in order to avoid costly mistakes such as pursuing an unworkable idea for too long or creating artwork for a design that is not yet finalised.

Design Process

1.  Initiation: The agency and customer meet to discuss initial ideas and objectives. The agency needs to interpret from this meeting what the customer hopes to achieve.

2.  Creative Brief: The agency sets out a brief for the customer which outlines the aims and objectives of the project and target audience as they have interpreted it. The brief will include such things as tone, style, parameters and corporate ID.

3.  Concepting: The designers present some initial ideas and designs to the customers. There may be much discussion between the agency and customer on ideas and which route to follow.

4.  Design: The customer chooses a design route on which they wish to proceed and ideas are firmed up with a view to fixing a final work.

5.  Artwork: At this stage the design will be finalised.

6.  Print and Reproduction: The design finally goes to print and the posters, flyers or whatever the product is will be printed in multiple copies for distribution.

The advertising agency that Biz/ed used came up with a number of ideas that were originally discussed. Most of these were rejected for a variety of reasons. One poster, for example, had an image of an aircraft and a large office block - the idea being to represent travel, tourism, the City and so on. However, it was commented that some people might take this the wrong way and think of the images associated with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. Other images featured PCs but it was felt that the images looked dated. Why not replace them with images of laptops instead? Would these images also look dated in two years time? How long would our posters have to last for - one year, two years, three years?

Following discussions of these early drafts, the eventual design was created and agreed. The intention was to mimic the 'mind map' idea and also to give the impression of the main features of the whole site as well as the fact that the site could be regarded as a journey very much like the underground. The idea came from one of the team who had recently travelled to Eastern Europe and had used a similar 'map' in getting round on the underground system in the country they had visited.

Two versions of the final design that were considered. Which is the best one and why?

It was decided to produce some posters that focused on particular areas of the site - these are two versions that were considered. Which of the two is the most effective? Which gets the message across most effectively? What about the colours used? Are the images useful in conveying the right message? Is there enough information on the posters or too much?

Below are examples of some of the discussions that were held during the period when the posters were being designed:

From the advertising agency who we used to help design the posters:

We will amend the existing concepts in line with your comments and can scamp up (a rough design idea, usually hand drawn) the mind map idea - this prevents attaching the additional cost of going into the detail of a Mac visual on a new concept at this stage. I will forward costs to date shortly so that you can see where we are.

From the project manager at Biz/ed:

Will a couple of you be around on Friday to meet with the agency? I think we need to see the next lot of designs and decide whether we are going to pursue them or come up with some other ideas, bearing in mind the costs involved.

From the senior technical researcher:

Regarding the posters I don't think it's just an issue of colours, I think we're still lacking ideas on the imagery needed for the materials which makes the designer's job very difficult.

From one of the content developers:

Fair point, I think though that ultimately there is a stereotypical view of what business and economics is all about and that involves 'money' in some form. The buildings I think do offer some image of the 'business' environment and there are a number of other things that will trigger the business/economics idea:

·  Graphs of stocks and share movements, currency movements, etc.

·  Cranes and containers signifying trade

·  EU flag

·  Company logos

·  'The Budget' box

·  Factory scenes

·  Industry scenes - chimneys, pipes, etc.

·  The Bank of England or Bank station underground sign

·  Commodity/currency traders at their desks

Most of these have been used at some point in time but it depends whether we are looking to promote the idea of what content we provide or what we are. If it is the latter then some form of Internet image is necessary or use pages of content as the trigger, e.g. the use of the mind map or the interactive markets 'logo', etc. The problem then comes back to how quickly the stuff will become dated.

In my experience, schools/colleges want something that looks attractive in terms of the colour combination and the impact, the number of people reading the detail on the poster is limited, the key information is the Biz/ed name and the URL. If people want to look at what we do they will check out the site but the poster serves as the thing that catches the eye and prompts them to delve further. Invariably those looking will not have pens or paper to hand to jot down details so getting the URL across is vital.

This is why I think that the colour combination is so important as it has to attract the eye to the poster. The imagery is likely to be largely 'fuzzy' and in the background - if that makes sense? Ultimately, therefore, I don't think that we are going to be able to get away from the popular perception of business type images. We either use these or go for the second option of pushing what we produce as a project?

We asked some teachers if they could ask their students to come up with some ideas. This is a reply from one of them:

I have discussed it with three groups so far, and have to report that their ideas have not been particularly brilliant. In fact, they found this very difficult!! Below is the list of suggestions in its entirety (including the obscure):

·  money (popular, if uninspired)

·  oil

·  flow of money

·  JM Keynes

·  dollar sign

·  demand and supply curves

·  coins

·  newspaper headlines

·  Gordon Brown

·  cityscape

·  buildings

·  Canary Wharf

·  Richard Branson