One way of reviewing the success and impact of a firm's promotional tools is to examine the split of their paid, owned, and earned media. This classification of media has arisen in the era of digital marketing, where a greater variety of promotional tools are available to brands, and when it has been much easier (than in the past) to both "own" media and to generate "earned" media. In the past, large (especially service) firms have had the ability to access paid, owned, and earned media. However, in today's marketing environment, even small businesses have the same access. For example, in the pre-internet era most forms of paid media (e.g. advertising) was quite expensive and often cost prohibitive for small firms. However, firms can now advertise online with very small budgets and utilize low-cost (and even free) advertising designs. And in that earlier era, generating earned media was primarily reserved for large brands who could more successfully generate media attention and publicity. Again, these days with consumer generated content and various bloggers and influencers, many more firms can also enjoy earned media. And it is even possible for small firms to have owned media, by having their own YouTube channel as an example. Again, in the past, owned media has often restricted with chains of retail premises and outlets. Marketing manager's discussion meeting Ray: I'd like to welcome everybody here to discuss our proposed new product launch campaign. This is a product we have worked hard on, and we need to ensure that we adequately promoted to generate our targeted sales and revenue goals. Georgina, would you like to start with outlining the key promotion tools that you think we should use. Georgina: Thanks Ray, clearly we need to generate significant awareness for the new product. Obvious initial tools would include: media releases, use of our influencer partners, information on our website, and search results advertising - all of which we would do normally as part of our campaigns. However, I like to discuss some other possibilities today. I like to get people's thoughts on a series of videos we could place on to our YouTube channel. Brian: We have had mixed results with our YouTube videos in the past. Some of our videos have gone viral and have attracted 100,000s of views, while others have struggled to get a viewership. I would tend to think that we might be better off looking at sponsored posts where we pay for articles to be posted on high-traffic relevant websites. Jamie: Yes, perhaps that's a possibility, but we should look at why some of the YouTube videos did better than others. Some of them attracted many likes and had lots of comments, which we responded to. So perhaps it's a matter of getting the right video and messaging? Mike: I think we need to be more integrated with our approach, rather than considering individual tools. Sure, we have a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, a website, and even our own phone app, all of which are potential tools. But don't forget we have lots of email addresses of our customers, as well as mobile phone numbers for SMS messages. Chris: But all of those tools only reach our existing customers. We need to think about attracting new customers as well, given our new product has a number of superior features to our competitors. We really need to think about attracting a few more influencers, generating online discussion, getting positive product reviews early on, and even doing well with SEO. Ray: Gee we have lots of tools to consider - is there any else that we have forgotten? Simone: I think that the product is strong enough to repay a return on advertising. Certainly, YouTube and social media advertising should be included, but we could also look at more mainstream advertising including TV and radio. Graham: If that's the case, that our product should do so well, we should also push out media releases to mainstream media and to specialist websites, who likely to run articles about the product. Ray: Thanks everyone, we have lots of ideas. Let's meeting again in a few days and discuss how we can combine all these possible tools into an integrated marketing launch campaign. Student Discussion Questions 1. Go through the above discussion and list all the promotional tools mentioned. 2. Then classify the list of tools into the three categories of paid, owned, and earned media. 3. Outline the marketing challenge/s facing the firm in this situation (what are their objectives?) 4. Which of the tools and which of the categories of media would be the most effective if their prime target market was: Existing customers New customers