KL MacMorran

After completing our research and identifying that the main problem the 'i' has is competition from online articles, we began to look at the best way to do this and answer the brief given to us. The brief was difficult to address it was quite limiting. We were asked to come up with a paper based campaign which could be developed digitally online eventually and put a small budget to big effect.

Below is a simple poster aims to do just that. It's straight to the point, clear and eye-catching. It encourages the use of a newspaper over online articles by subtly suggesting, perhaps comical, uses for a newspaper that cannot be achieved with online articles. As suggested by our investigation it doesn't matter why or how people come to buy/see the 'i' as long as it is in front of them so they can trial it and hopefully like it enough to buy it in future! If someone buys the 'i' to protect a surface while painting, as it only costs 20p, they are likely to flick through it beforehand and potentially become a frequent customer. The repetition of the 'i' logo reinforces the product in viewers' minds and hopefully when next buying a newspaper they will think of 'i'. This poster is also easily adaptable and low cost to produce. As well as displaying around campus, the poster would fit nicely in a magazine or scaled down as a flyer.

When waiting on transport, which students do on a daily basis, people often like something to occupy their mind. This poster shown below, encourages observer interaction. The idea behind this design is that 'i' is the one newspaper that suits all needs. Again, this poster promotes other uses for a newspaper that cannot be achieved through online alternatives and is cost effective.

Also, this design has the potential to be developed digitally to appear online (as required by the brief), for example, as an interactive advertisement  on social networking site that viewers could flick through, with the end result always being 'i'.

Another avenue the flow chart design could develop into is in campus shops. We noticed upon visiting our own campus shop that the ‘I’ is hard to pick out from current displays as it blends in with other papers, especially as the ‘I’ logo is on the left hand side of the front cover and other papers are stacked to overlap it. Our solution to this problem involves guiding customers to the ‘I’ newspaper stand. We propose this is done by providing shops with large stickers to put on their floor. The stickers would act in the same way the flow chart posters but would be adapted to focus on attracting people who are planning to buy a newspaper and encourage them to choose ‘I’. Below is a rough idea of how this would work.

Below is a rough sketch of the typical simple design of the point of sale unit we propose is used.

After discussions with our tutor, we decided our next steps for this project should include constructing a list of both rational & irrational reasons why a typical student would buy a newspaper and put together a persona of such a person.

RATIONAL

Interest in current affairs

Relevant to course work

To read on the commute to uni

To contribute to a conversation

To read a featured article of particular interest to them

To collect printed voucher for relevant offers

To complete included puzzles

Enter included competitions

To find out what's on TV/local events

IRRATIONAL

To appear intelligent

To impress peers

To make a hat

Enable them to sit on a seat when it's raining without getting wet

Mop up a spilled drink

To protect surfaces when painting

To use in a pets litter tray

To make a boat

Keep warm on the street

To make paper chains

Wrap fish & chips

To construct a ransom note

To use instead of wrapping paper

To block light out of windows

To spy on people by cutting out peep holes

To make a paper aeroplane

To draw on

A substitute for toilet roll

To use as an umbrella

After Compiling the list of rational reasons to buy the 'i' against irrational reasons we noticed that there were a n umber of uses for the newspaper that cannot be achieved be reading articles online, such as making paper aeroplanes or wrapping presents. This ties in with the theory that advertisements should push the benefits rather than features when trying to sell a product, in this case, the benefits of being a newspaper would be the other uses for the paper.

To conclude our research we created a persona of what we think a typical student 'i' consumer would be like.

PERSONA

Paul.

24.

Student at Dundee University - Final year studying politics.

Likes football & socialising.

Has a part-time job.

In a long-term relationship but lives with two other male flatmates.

Likes films and occasionally plays computer games.

Good taste - careful with money and saves up for more expensive items.

Takes care of himself and eats well.

Inquisitive nature.

THE PROBLEM:

Day 3

As mentioned in my previous blog, in order to gain a greater understanding of student communities and their views on newspapers we constructed an online survey with the aid of Google Docs. After publishing the survey last week, we have a total of 33 responses.

One of the more interesting but perhaps least surprising results was that 36% of students asked preferred to read news articles online in comparison to just 6% purchasing newspapers (as shown in the picture below).

Another important point that came to light was that although very few students would choose to buy a newspaper, a staggering 67% (2/3 of those who responded) said they would read a newspaper if it was given to them or was lying around. This shows that perhaps it is more important to initially get newspapers in front of students as apposed to encouraging them to buy a paper themselves, relating back to - and supporting - the brief that states "once people trial the product they love it." The pie chart below illustrates the drawn conclusion.

Currently our group is considering the most effective use of a campaign to make the 'i' newspaper popular among students. We have looked at the following three options:

1.To target students directly and encourage them to purchase the paper.

2. To target the student unions, shops, etc. and come up with ways to get them on board and push the product. (Where it's sold, how it's sold, promotions etc.)

3. To find a way of getting students to sample the paper initially then lead up to selling the paper to students.

As mentioned above our research suggests that a combination of the second and third approaches would be most beneficial for the product. We have discussed how it might be easier to convince students who are regular newspaper readers that the 'i' would be beneficial to them but the real challenge lies in convincing students who do not currently read newspapers to start.

As I briefly mentioned in my previous post, I am currently working on a team project with Hannah Doig and Sean McGonigal. The aim of the project is to make the ‘i’, The Independent's smaller sister newspaper, the most read paper among young people, particularly students.

Released in 2010, the paper was launched as a more concise version of The Independent and it was the first daily newspaper of its kind in Britain (and also the first quality newspaper to be introduced in over 25 years). The initial target market the paper was designed for included busy people with modern lifestyles, such as commuters. Costing just 20p, the paper is a manageable size and provides an "essential daily briefing" for readers.

The brief states the aim of the campaign is to engage with a younger audience, specifically students, to build a community of student readers and have an in-depth engagement/interaction with this audience. The campaign is to be creative and resourceful working to a small budget but creating a big effect. The focus of the campaign should start off on university campuses as a print based campaign, but should also able to work online eventually, particularly on social media channels. There is also to be scope for it to develop in to a national campaign targeting other markets.

Day 1

After buying a copy and reading the ‘i’ for the first time, we quickly constructed two diagrams: a SWOT analysis graph and a perceptual map both shown below.

Using a perceptual map to plot ‘i’ in against cost and quality in relation to other papers, it quickly became apparent that the ‘i’ was the only newspaper to provide good quality journalism at a low cost and therefore positioned in a category of its own. Although the paper competes with other newspapers of good quality (or in other cases free papers), in a way the ‘I’ has no direct competition as it is one of a kind, tailored to meet a specific market.

From the SWOT analysis graph, used to identify any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats in relation to ‘i’, we were surprised to find that we could identify many more strengths than weaknesses. The main threats we identified were competition from free papers such as Metro and the availability of free articles online.

Day 2

In order to gain a greater understanding of student communities and their views on newspapers we carried out two surveys. The first was an online survey put together using Google Docs shown by the following link (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dF9HUnFmcWxOT21PVUxfVE1lM0RnOWc6MA) in which we asked the following questions:

Describe briefly in your own words the type of person you expect to see reading a newspaper? (Don't be afraid to stereotype!)

How do you personally keep up-to-date with current news/events? (Select one choice from the choices below)

Buying the newspaper

Reading newspaper articles online

Word of mouth

Watching the news on TV

Listening to the news on the radio

By using social networking sites/apps on smart phones

 Describe briefly in your own words what your ideal newspaper would be like? (Include suggestions of what type of articles you would like to read and physical features such as size)

If someone you knew bought a newspaper or there was a newspaper lying around would you take a look? (Perhaps someone else at home buys newspapers or someone leaves a copy behind on the train?)

Never

Sometimes

It’s more than likely I will have a glance

The second survey included a more generative tool, drawing. We provided students with a drawing of a stick man and asked them to turn the man into the type of person they would expect to see reading a newspaper. The idea behind asking people to draw is to encourage a casual conversation about newspapers in the hope they would get more involved.

Currently we are working in small teams to tackle a live brief set by 'i', The Independent's sister newspaper. The set task is as follows:

"Create a campaign to make 'i' the most read newspaper amount students."

Below is a like to the full brief if you would like to find out some more about this project.

http://awards.ycnonline.com/briefs/view/i/

If you are a student and would like to help us research this topic we would be grateful to anyone who could fill out the attached survey by clicking the title of this blog post or clicking on the link below. It should only take a few minutes to complete! Thank you :)

Repositioning occurs when a brand decides to change its market position by changing its image, to reflect a change in consumers' tastes. This can happen for many reasons, such as the brand's original market maturing or going into decline.

Lucozade is an energy drink which has been on sale in the UK since 1927 (under the original name Glucozade, before rebranding to its current form in 1929), produced by the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. Lucozade was repositioned from a sick child’s drink to a healthy adult's drink. The company wanted to take advantage of the bigger target market in the faster growing healthy adult’s soft-drink sector and repositioned the brand accordingly. This radical repositioning saw a dramatic increase in sales.

Below is a perceptual map illustrating Lucozade’s reposition:

Evidence of the company’s desire to move towards a more adult market can be seen from the following advertisement, shown on British TV in 1972: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOH34Y9SwKM). By showing the child's mother consuming the drink in order to boost her energy levels when taking care of her sick child - who is also drinking Lucozade, Ogilvy & Mather (the advertising agency responsible for the campaign) begins to draw attention away from marketing the product towards those who are sick and instead aiming the product towards those wishing to replenish lost energy.

The first instance of Lucozade’s repositioning exercise with a full focus on energy replenishment took place in 1985. The advert features British former Olympic decathlete Daley Thompson sprinting after drinking Lucozade, while a fast-paced song (Iron Maiden's Phantom of the Opera) plays in the background, with a voice-over by well-known sport broadcaster Des Lynam. The slogan of the drink also changed from "Lucozade aids recovery" to "Lucozade replaces lost energy." The campaign was very effective, with sales of the product between 1984 and 1989 tripling to $115million.

After watching the video (link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vam5Lxadio) I found that in contrast to previous advertising campaigns which focused on recovering from illness, every campaign from the Daley Thompson advert onwards has focused on energy replenishment.

Currently, however, as part of the "YES" campaign, a popular band/musician appears on (and helps design) a bottle of each flavour of Lucozade Energy, possibly in order to appeal to a younger demographic and move even further away from the common associations the brand has regarding illness. By shifting the brand's attention towards music, Lucozade Energy is trying to recreate its previous successes in sport while breaking into a very crowded energy drink market. Using popular chart musicians is, in my view, a clever way to approach targeting a brand towards younger consumers, who may - as a result - have a greater affinity towards Lucozade if it is shown to use well-known artists in such a way.

A recent TV advertisement for Lucozade Sport features a song performed by the rapper Tinie Tempah (a British musician whose likeness appears on the Orange flavoured bottle of Lucozade Energy he helped design) and Travis Barker (best known as the drummer for the band Blink-182), while an Irish female boxing champion, Katie Taylor, trains in the video. By including representation from both sport and music, Lucozade successfully keeps hold of its existing market (athletic people) while expanding into a new target demographic (young persons influenced by music).

The area now known as 'Merchant City' was developed from the 1750's onwards when the first warehouses were built in the area by suppliers of tobacco, tea and sugar. During the 19th century, Glasgow rapidly grew to become one of the most industrialised cities in the British Empire and as a result, what is now recognised as the Merchant City area, became a working district of warehouses and home to the city's biggest markets.

The area fell into decline in the 1960s, as many of the buildings were set to be demolished to make way for a ring road around the city centre. However plans for the road fell through and in the 1980s it was decided that the area should be re-branded as Merchant City.

  Today the area is witnessing a remarkable rebirth. Previously redundant historic buildings now house cutting edge theatres and galleries combined with shops, cafes and restaurants. This has been complemented with the building of impressive new housing developments, often by restoring historic Victorian buildings.

Another important aspect of the areas revitalisation is the well-established Merchant City Festival which takes place in September and attracts tens of thousands of visitors to the area every year.

On Thursday I was given the opportunity to visit Merchant City and see for myself the impressive reuse of the area.

So after realising the space I had to work with, I chose the layout I felt had the most potential and constructed a rough paper model of the 3D space.

Since my last studio update I have developed some of the shapes which derived from lungs into basic floor plans by dividing up the spaces which naturally formed within.

Below are a couple of examples of proposed uses for the spaces.

To help me visualise how these floor plans could become physical spaces, I used tracing paper to layer the plans and create 3-dimensional sketches. I found this quick method of drawing very useful as it is a good way of illustrating the volumes of spaces within the context of the building. Below are just some of such drawings.

Recently I visited Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres' exhibition - The Architecture of Hope - at The Lighthouse in Glasgow. The exhibition was an opportunity to learn more about illness management spaces through looking at scale models and drawings of both well and badly received Maggie's building designs. I found the exhibition to be very useful as it allowed me to gain a greater understanding of how such buildings function. Below are some photos of the newest Maggie's centre in Gartnavel, including a photograph of the architect's scale model.

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE PROBLEM OF MEN'S RELUCTANCE TO VISIT THE DOCTOR

As you can see, above is a quick sketch of a set of lungs. Why, you ask? Well, tonight I have been thinking of possible shapes for my 'physical breathing space.' After spending a good while attempting to reach an appropriate starting point, I decided in order to get the ball rolling, I would take the basic outline of lungs and see what shapes they could form. Stupidly simple - and perhaps a little too literal - but it did get me thinking! The top right doodle in particular is encouraging and I hope, leading somewhere!

Personally, I feel yesterday's task went well, despite having just one day to complete it. Many people work well under pressure and as a result, vast amounts of ideas were generated quickly. I think our team made good use of the time and divided up tasks between groups efficiently. Everyone was very involved for most of the day with only one or two people losing interest towards the end. 

I'm happy with our final outcome and I think it is a successful response to the brief, for the most part. The campaign has the potential to be developed further and so perhaps instead of another one day brief, it would be more beneficial to revisit this task and get the most out of it we can.

Working in such a large group meant it was difficult to know where to start and get the ball rolling but once we did, the volume of such different ideas that could be produced was great.

I was very surprised at how easy it was to decide which campaign we were going to put forward as I was worried so many people would mean many different strong opinions. The voting system proved useful as we could whittle ideas down, exploring each one further as we did, until we reached one almost everyone was happy with. Even those who would not say this campaign was their first choice, could see the benefits of it and agree it had potential.

As I stated in my previous blog about the American Government's ad campaign, men are well known for avoiding making doctor’s appointments even when they have a problem which needs seeing to. Therefore symptoms which could be treated easily are instead left to develop and - in many cases - create more serious problems further down the line.

As part of our advertising and branding module we were given just one day to come up with our own hypothetical ad campaign to tackle this problem. Below is what our team of about 15 people came up with.

Aim: To encourage young adult men to visit their GP by targeting women.

Problem: The majority of men tend to ignore symptoms which could potentially lead to a much more serious illness.

"Taking risks and thinking nothing will happen is seen as being part and parcel of being a man." - This quote taken from an article published by the BBC suggests one reason this might be the case.

Research: In order to gather as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time, we split into two main groups: desk researchers and live researchers.

The first was made up of a team of four (myself included) and we looked at various articles on the subject and found many relevant quotes, statistics and looked at existing campaigns on similar topics including the video I posted recently and the Aviva life insurance ad with Paul Whitehouse (http://youtu.be/TkyoCHCZlKw). We found these existing campaigns to be particularly blunt and felt they could perhaps be quite frightening to both customers and consumers.

The live researchers split into a further two groups one finding out what severity of symptoms would make men go to doctors and the second finding out how women influence men. We found that most men would wait for a problem to develop before going to their GP with one man stating that even if he found a lump in his testicle, he would still refuse to go see a doctor. Women mentioned various ways in which they would encourage men to do something with their partners claiming they just done things to make the women happy without actually agreeing with her.

Approach: After brainstorming our findings we quickly started to generate initial ideas with the philosophy that at this stage, every idea was a good idea with the potential to be developed and nothing was left out. After exploring as many avenues as possible we each stated which ideas we liked and why with two clear winners. Both ideas were then exhausted with further brainstorming before we all voted for the one we felt was most relevant to the brief.

Campaign: Our final campaign was further developed with the catchphrase changing from "or is it?" to "or is he?" to allow it to be applied to various scenarios and ensure it was specific to men. We originally decided on this phrase as it was not gender, age or relationship specific and also it does not give to much away about what the ad is about, encouraging customers to look closer. 

"Or is he?" encourages women (and men) to question potential symptoms of illness instead of scaring them into going to the doctors in the way the American campaign did.

We chose to twist the problem and play on women's concience by targeting women who frequently brush of men's health issues and turn the women into the problem. This also avoids women being portrayed as nags or moans which we felt would put them off encouraging men to go to their GP. This twist enables the ads to reach out to men as well as they can associate themselves with the scenarios, feeling sorry for themselves instead of feeling like the bad guys.

We chose three scenarios that we felt both men and women could relate to for demonstrating our proposal. Man flu, shortness of breath and forgetfulness, all symptoms which could demonstrate an under lying problem. Other potential extensions of this campaign could include a man complaining of stiff mussels and a women suggesting he is over doing things at the gym... or is he?

One of this week's tasks for L3 I&ED students was to populate and personalise our space. After all, we are meant to be creative people, and blank white walls are not a true reflection of this. Some people got together and painted their silhouettes around the room and others created areas in which to display their work & doodles which represented their personality.

I decided I would create a frame (demonstrating my organised and neat characteristics) in which I could show a mood board of current projects, contact information and photographs from my deign processes.

Below are some pictures of my frame which is yet to be filled but includes luggage tags acting as business cards.

When researching this problem in preparation for pitching ideas for an advertising campaign, I stumbled across this existing campaign in America attempting to shock men into visiting their GP.

What are focus groups?

Focus groups are a form of qualitative research and involve inviting a group of participants - typically 6 to 8 people - to share their thoughts, feelings, attitudes and ideas on a specific subject. They are commonly used by companies as an input to design as they are a useful tool in gathering opinions on a new product or service from the potential target market.

Why use focus groups?

Pros:

They are quick, cheap and easy to organise.

Participants can speak freely and give deeper insights.

One person's train of thought can lead to another's and therefore ideas can be bounced from person to person (better than 1-to-1 interview).

Encourages involvement from younger persons and those with low levels of literacy.

Companies can find what issues are most important to customers and/or consumers.

Cons:

Responses of each participant are not independent.

A few participants may dominate discussions.

Groups need a skilled moderator to keep conversations on track.

In order to get the most information from focus groups, data gathered should be analysed by someone experienced in doing so.

Preparing focus groups:

Focus groups typically last for approximately one hour and an agenda should be prepared beforehand, including a list of the most important topics to be addressed. Allowing time for an introduction to explain to participants how the session will run enables the group to have a clear understanding of what is being asked of them. Encouraging participants to wear name badges and sit around the same table will enable free-flowing discussions including everyone.