Marketing Assignment: The Evaluation

PR is all about building relationships to advance, promote, and benefit the reputation of you yourself, your department and institution. PR is about communicating your message to gain allies, advocates, supporters, etc. in the community and the institution. PR is often needed when the relationship between customers and consumers is broken, which could be due to brand damage, bad press, loss of sales and profit, and many more. 

Within the creative industry, PR and marketing are very much relied on by those that work within it as it is the key to selling almost anything. Marketing and PR is beneficial in many different ways, one example being the way in which Mcdonalds has sufficiently made a successful comeback after it's bad press problems. With it's updated menu, TV ads, price list and overall appearance, the company has never been more successful. 

Within this assignment I was set the task to create my very own PR and Marketing agency that would help to deal with a company that was facing downfall. GoldMasters Agency, the company I created, is a well known and very successful business that deals with the failures and complications other companies within different industries are facing. I have chosen to deal with Missguided, a highly popular online fashion etailer. Missguided had recently begun to slip into the dynamics of bad press and brand damage. This was due to the company becoming inadequate and unsuccessful in delivering their customers orders in the selected time frame they had been paying for. Among the highest of this was next day delivery. Missguided were constantly being bombarded over social media (their key to advertisement and promotion) by angry customers making complaints about their failure to deliver. They had began to lose trust with their customers and potential markets. All the meanwhile, whilst their competitors such as Asos and Boohoo were continuing to succeed within their business, Missguided were slowly falling behind. 

A creative brief was created which was written from the clients perspective. This was presented to the company to address the requirements Missguided have in relation to bettering the problems they were currently having. GoldMasters took extensive research to come up with a final solution; the strategy and the plan. We did this by focusing on the current issues and coming up with ways to resolve them. We also kept in the mind the fact that the ultimate aim was to gain customers trust again, because if Missguided failed to do that then the company could face a huge loss in sales due to lack and loss of customers. We researched statistics, and presented illustrated examples of unhappy customers and their complaints. We were only able to present a certain amount of complaints as examples as their were so many of them. GoldMasters and Missguided then went on to discuss the target market and audience research. Even though it will always remain the same, it is important to still consider who we will be creating the promotional materials for. Overall, tit was decided that the main goal was for GoldMasters to create a campaign that advertises the improvements within the business that have been made to transform our delivery system. 

Once all the background research had been completed and the goal had been set, GoldMasters were then able to create the action plan for Missguided using a variety of creative solutions. The solutions that I was going to create (and have created) needed to have realistic ways of happening. The time frame that we allowed for the campaign was only a week and 3 days long. In this type of industry, fast updates throughout the fashion world will attract many peoples attention, so if things went to plan and happened quickly, it would keep people more intrigued and interested instead of dragging it out and making people wait 2 or 3 weeks to have an insight about what is happening. 

The first objective GoldMasters had for Missguided was to get feedback on their new and improved delivery services. Without doing this step first, their would be no point combining the second strategy we have planned. The first strategy and the second were combined together. To do so, we came up with the idea of creating a competition for the first 100 customers to sign up for Missguided's Newsletter or create an account with them, had the chance to win a free £50 voucher. The winners will receive their voucher by email, which will be in a code format. In order to claim the full £50 voucher, they will only be given £35 of it first. This is because the customers have to of actually bought something in order to have experienced the new delivery system. After they have completed that part, they will then be able to claim the other £15. Before doing so, they must answer a short survey GoldMasters and Missguided have come up with together, in order to get feedback about the new delivery services. 

The reason we would urge customers to sign up for the newsletter as a way of entering the competition is to increase sales generally for Missguided. The number of sales they make is not a great concern to Goldmasters by any means as they are very successful in that aspect of their business. 

The second part of my action plan is to offer a writer from Glamour Magazine a voucher for an article review. I chose Glamour Magazine because they share the same age demographic as Missguided (16-34) and have been featured in the magazine many times. It is also very popular and successful, and has good feedback on the types of reviews the magazine includes. By having a third party opinion, it allows Missguided to claim that little bit extra of expertise to let their customers know that the company have made some serious changes. 

And finally the last part of the action plan was to just create a TV advert to increase sales generally. My marketing strategy & plan states and explains in depth the stages GoldMasters will be taking Missguided through in order to achieve the goals set. 

To publicise my campaign, posters have been created that will be advertised in bus stops and on buses, billboards and adverts on TV. But more importantly, GoldMasters felt by taking advantage of free promotion, a press release should be conducted in order to give an outline on the events that will be going underway. Also by releasing the press release and allowing people to know what will feature in the next issue of Glamour Magazine, which will be the review, GoldMasters and Missguided also open an opportunity for Glamour Magazine to reach an increase in sales due to public interest and curiosity about what Glamour had to say about the new delivery services. 

The strengths of my products are as follows. The posters that I created were bright, attractive, fun and eye catching. They looked good and included information that got straight to the point. I didn't want to give too much away on the posters, which is why on one of them it simply just tells you to go to the website to 'find out more'. The weaknesse's was that I didn't take my own photos.

The strengths of my press release were that it gave clear and uncomplicated outlines as to what the campaign involved. It included key dates and gave quotes from the company which allowed for a more professional overall discussion. The weaknesses were that I could have elaborated a bit more on how customers felt about the bad delivery services. 

Overall, this assignment has been challenging but a great deal of fun at the same time. Trying to make decisions on the right ideas for a campaign was tricky, as the ultimate goal was to make the company I had chosen successful in every way possible. I think due to having such a short time frame for the campaign, if I had maybe produced more material such as radio advert or even conducted an interview with the PR team of Missguided, I could of taken things a lot further and gotten a lot more success and gained even more customers than what we have. 

I was happy with my ideas in the end, I thought i had created a good solid campaign that will be remembered as the start of progress Missguided will continue to make for the first steps of their new delivery system. I was happy with the way my products turned out and I enjoyed creating them. 

This assignment has potential to help me in the future because it has allowed me to further my understanding about PR and Marketing on the whole, which I believe is due to having such practical tasks, it was obviously almost like I was the actual business and my job was to be creative, understanding, smart and confident in order to help another company out. I feel I have gained skills that will stick with me, such as time organisation, clear planning, being able to work as a team and work well under stress. 

Creative Material: Posters