The product that I chose to investigate in assignment 1 was a Blackberry Smartphone. I am going to continue this investigation by looking into the promotion targeted at a certain target market and then creating an audience profile.
Blackberry Smartphone has two types of audiences. Their primary audience are Business people and has gradually developed to the younger generation like Students and these are their secondary audience. Blackberry is becoming increasingly popular with students even more so than their primary audience. This is the opposite for Blackberry’s and RIM’s competition who are iPhones by Apple. As their primary target audience are students and their secondary audience are Business people. The Blackberry Smartphone has a target market of students between the ages of 16 - 25 as this is becoming increasingly popular with this generation, as it’s more current and up to date. The audience profile that I have created for the target audience is a student of either gender and they are attending college or university so between the ages of 16 – 25. They travel by bus to their classes and live in a large city that is very urban like London and Birmingham.
The media proposal that I think suits the target audience of students and will help promote the Blackberry further is Facebook.
Facebook was in fact targeted at students attending universities as the founder “Mark Zuckerberg, 23, attended Harvard University who had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students”. Facebook or ‘The Facebook’ as it was originally known was created in February 2004, solely for students and in 2006 it went further to anyone with an e-mail address.
Using Facebook as my chosen element of the social media landscape to communicate to students about the benefits and features of the Blackberry will help increase and promote further the brand and sales of Blackberry’s. Already on Facebook, Blackberry has a fan page and it currently has 1,628,756 fans, and this is an on-going total. This fan page enables Blackberry to promote new phones or new apps that they may have and this will be broadcasted to the millions who are a fans of the page. Blackberry can also advertise future product and using this fan page it allows people to comment on these new products, so Blackberry can get an idea of how well it will do or may not do in the market. Blackberry can promote their features on Facebook to 16 -24 year olds by using targeted advertising and so Blackberry can have an advert in the right hand side of the screen whenever the user is on Facebook or selects a profile link. I think that Facebook is well suited to my audience profile as Facebook is most popular with the younger generations as a recent report in the telegraph states that “About 83 per cent of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites to keep in touch with friends and organize their social lives” the advantage of this for Blackberry is that that they can advertise to a specific audience as Facebook allows Businesses like Blackberry to do focused advertising and this will be based on age, gender, interests etc.
Blackberry can also use this to their advantage, as Blackberry has its own app for Facebook, this feature will help promote Blackberry smartphones to their target audience of 16-25 year olds. As this is also the age of Facebook’s primary users and the app will enable students to update their profile and socilise whilst away from a laptop or computer screen.
The advantage of my chosen media of ‘Facebook’ is that it is extremely popular, not only with the younger generation but also the more mature generation. The advantage of this is businesses can target their audience appropriately, which means Blackberry can target 16 -24 year based on their interest and what they have searched previously on Facebook.
However the disadvantage of social sites is that it’s not good for building brand awareness, a larger scale of advertisement is needed for this. However as Blackberry is an established brand already and recognised by consumers, the social site of Facebook can help increase sales and attract new customers for Blackberry.
Comparing this to the more traditional forms of media like Television and radio, I believe that the newer technology and media is taking over the traditional forms. This is because television is adapting like ‘Sky’ and ‘Virgin’ have a forward button which allows viewers to skip the adverts. However I still think that television can influence the audience’s decisions more than the new media can. The other main traditional media is radio, I think it will be hard for Blackberry to advertise and promote on the radio as it requires a more visual outlook for consumers to understand and be influenced. However radio is changing and developing to be more visual and for Blackberry this would be an advantage as the radio reaches an audience in the ‘’3rd place’’ which is the car, where the TV or other media cannot get to the customer. I think radio is very specific, and for Blackberry with their target audience of 16 -24 year olds they will not be able to drive or have a car and if they do then they would tend to listen to their own music rather than the radio.
Overall I think the best form of media is social network site Facebook, as its ever growing and for Blackberry they can increase their sales and target their audience of 16 – 24 year olds quicker than Television or magazines as in a recent article around “63.9 %” of students “spending the most amount of internet time on social networking sites like Facebook” and around “46.3 per cent spending 4-5 hours and one fifth over six hours a day online”.