(A) Strategies of Advertising Industry

Nowadays, the advertising industry has mushroomed all around the world, reshaping the relationships between customers, corporation and products. In essence, advertising is a marketing tool which delivers messages of products to target customers with the purpose of changing the attitudes and behaviors of target audience towards products. There are various ways of advertising. Among them, viral marketing, the creation of ‘Kid’ culture and cool hunting are the most common advertising strategies. In the following part, I would demonstrate how viral marketing, the creation of ‘Kid’ culture and cool hunting alter advertising industry.

Viral marketing indicates the phenomenon of the word – of - mouth communication (Rodic 7). In traditional marketing, the most common way for businesses is to encourage regular customers to recommend products to familiar people. With the rapid development of the internet, the idea of ‘Word of Mouth’ prevails again. Compared to many other advertising ways such as TV ads for which corporations pay a large amount of money, viral marketing is relatively inexpensive for advertising and marketing campaigns. More and more businesses take viral marketing as the core of marketing strategies. For example, the advertising words - ‘just do it’ by Nike Inc are like a virus, spreading from one person’s mouth to the other person’s mouth all around the world. The simple advertising words are inspiring, arousing consumers’ interests in buying sports shoes of Nick. Those who buy the shoes believe that after wearing the shoes, they would become capable. Hence, viral marketing proves to be a very successful marketing tool for Nick Inc. Besides, consumers and producers have more interaction with the promotion of viral marketing strategy. Producers want to utilize consumers to achieve the goal of promoting products while consumers want to get great experiences from the products provided by producers. For instance, the website AOL used to hold a competition named about.com among users. Those who got the most votes could enjoy a trip to New York. Advertising about the competition appeared in Twitter and Facebook. Soon AOL attracted more than five times of visitors than in normal times. Hence, it can be seen that viral marketing brings win-win results for both of consumers and producers.

The other strategy of advertising is creating ‘Kid’ culture. The advertisers stressed the role of youth’s power and autonomy; hence, the term Kid was created. Nowadays, advertising and marketing have ingrained in the daily lives of youths. Currently, families usually respect the choices of youths. Youths have more power to purchase what they want. As a result, advertising targeting at youths and products marked to youths explode. Many advertisers aim at marketing products to youths directly. They would put themselves in the shoes of children to design an advertisement. For example, the actor in one chocolate advertisement would also be a child. When youths see their peer appears in the advertisement, the interest in the products would be aroused. It is called peer assimilation psychologically. Also, in recent years, advertisers start to blur the line between advertising and contents, which is called stealth marketing. For example, there are lots of advergames developed by many game companies to connect consumers with advertising. The contents of advertising are embed in games. At the same time when children play games, the messages of advertising products are delivered. There is a game named Squashies World Free designed for children. During the game, game players have to squash many things such as candies and chocolates. Colorful and eye-catching candies attract the attention of children, motivating game players’ desire to buy those products. Another advertising strategy targeting at children is to cultivate brand awareness in youths. The 1980s saw the rapid growth of advertising related to cartoon images. Children who always watch animations would also like to buy or pester their parents to buy products when they see the advertising. For example, the classic cartoon image Mickey Mouse has attracted thousands of youths to buy the products. However, as direct consumers or potential consumers, the relationship between youths and producers of advertising may change with the growth of age. At the early age, children who watch advertising belief that advertising only brings benefits to them without realizing that advertising persuades them in purchasing. When they have the capability to understand, they may not follow what advertising say and buy those products anymore.

Another strategy of advertising is cool hunting, also known as trend watching. Cool hunting refers to the observations and predictions of the changes of new cultural trends (Glore and Cooper 9). Correspondingly, those who make the observations and predictions are called cool hunters. Cool hunters usually take young men aged from 16 to 35 as target audiences. Youths are a huge consuming group in the world, who like to follow their peers in purchasing. Hence, when there is something their peer consider as cool, they would also like to follow the trends. That’s why advertising standing for ’cool’ appear. Cool hunters grasp the minds of youths and master what they like to make fancy advertising. For example, Adidas Company always hires famous sportsmen to star in the advertising such as Michael Jorden. Those who watch the advertising want to become as cool as those stars; hence they would have the impulse to buy those products. Cool hunters not only market the idea of what is ‘cool’ to youths but also the products related to ‘cool.' For example, many young people think that using iPhone is cool. Thus, iPhone sells well in youths. Besides, consumers dominate the relationship with producers of cool hunting because cool hunters need to know consumers’ habits to produce cool advertising.

To summer up, all of the viral marketing, the creation of ‘Kid’ Culture and cool hunting are important for the advertising industry. They target different audiences and play different roles in advertising. The use of three strategies is changing advertising industry and make it thrive.