Week 1 - MARKETING TOOLS

The two main questions that you need to understand before learning the tools of marketing are: "What is a brand ?" and "What is advertising?". A brand consists of a mix between functional and emotional strengths that when combined provide an experience. However, advertising is the difference between you and someone else. It's subtle and isn't obvious, a good brand will advertise in such a way you will not realise and not noticing "plant a seed" that will change the way you buy.

"A brand is a promise & ads communicate that promise"

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This week i was given the task to develop a new proposal for one company out of the 3 choices ( DUSA, CATINA, V&A Dundee). In order to do this we had to use the recently learnt "marketing tools" which were: SWOT, Perception Maps&Positioning, "the 4 P's" (Price, Place, Product & Promotion) or "The Ansoff Matrix". 

My team decided to look at the DUSA. . . . .Our first step was to fire out initial individual thoughts through a brainstorm, using post stick notes. This was to gain a basic understanding of the general opinion of what we thought about the DUSA. After this  we sorted these opinions into a S.W.O.T (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities & Threats) map. We found it hard to find many threats and weaknesses about the DUSA as it was already was obviously already well tailored to suit the needs of it's target audience, students. However, after acknowledging this we understood that students ages range from the young to mature. So, the next obvious step would be a Perception map. We made four of these maps ( Y axis - Young/Old , X axis - Femine/Mature) and did one for each of the 4 most important aspects of any student Union. 


The final proposal, was to make the DUSA more welcoming to mature students and generally more of a comfortable place to be during the day. We found the services during the day put a lot of mature students off due to the noise and a lack promotion towards a comfortable environment to relax and eat. Our solution was to simply make the entrance more obvious with outside menus or Ads around the campus with more information on what food they serve rather than how cheap the booze is. Perhaps, even having another smaller union built on another part of the campus which focused more on a calm environment with even themed nights and a more pub / restaurant feel to it.