Mara Einstein exposes how our shopping, political, and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know® ...helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing industries work in the digital age, particularly in their uses and abuses of "Big Data." Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising's subtle and not-so-subtle impact on our lives-both as individuals and as a global society. What ideas and information are being communicated to us-and to what end?.
Compassion, Inc Einstein, Mara
2012., 20120327, 2012, 2012-04-26, 20120101
eBook
Pink ribbons, red dresses, and greenwashing—American corporations are scrambling to tug at consumer heartstrings through cause-related marketing, corporate social responsibility, and ethical ...branding, tactics that can increase sales by as much as 74%. Harmless? Marketing insider Mara Einstein demonstrates in this penetrating analysis why the answer is a resounding "No!" In Compassion, Inc. she outlines how cause-related marketing desensitizes the public by putting a pleasant face on complex problems. She takes us through the unseen ways in which large sums of consumer dollars go into corporate coffers rather than helping the less fortunate. She also discusses companies that truly do make the world a better place, and those that just pretend to.
American universities have significantly increased their marketing expenditures over the last decade. The high cost of education, reductions in government funding, and precipitous declines in the ...traditional college-aged population (18-21 year olds) are some of the key factors forcing universities to be more aggressive with the promotional techniques they use to attract prospective students. In this competitive marketplace, schools promote the attributes they believe will be most compelling to high schoolers and their parents, including academics, sports, campus life, and careers. Tied into this last factor is the promotion of internship opportunities. While some of these hands-on experiences lead to jobs, there are no guarantees that attending college and engaging in an internship will translate into full-time employment. Using content analysis and auto-ethnography, I examine how universities use internships to market higher education, and argue that this is a particularly pernicious practice within the area of media studies.
Pink ribbons, red dresses, and greenwashing—American corporations are scrambling to tug at consumer heartstrings through cause-related marketing, corporate social responsibility, and ethical ...branding, tactics that can increase sales by as much as 74%. Harmless? Marketing insider Mara Einstein demonstrates in this penetrating analysis why the answer is a resounding "No!" In Compassion, Inc. she outlines how cause-related marketing desensitizes the public by putting a pleasant face on complex problems. She takes us through the unseen ways in which large sums of consumer dollars go into corporate coffers rather than helping the less fortunate. She also discusses companies that truly do make the world a better place, and those that just pretend to.
Purpose
This paper aims to offer a marketing perspective to the multidisciplinary debate on whether religion is expanding, declining or resurging in contemporary and allegedly secular society. ...Specifically, it examines the “secularization hypothesis”, which predicts that religion tends to lose its central role in people’s lives as secular reasoning spreads and scientific knowledge accumulates.
Design/methodology/approach
Borrowing from psychology literature, the authors identify the psychological and social needs satisfied by religion and in doing so uncover its functions. They then discussed whether religion can be claimed to be functionally obsolete.
Findings
The authors identified four functions of religion: explanatory, relieving, membership and moral. The content of religious doctrines offers consumers of religion unambiguous knowledge, absolute morality and promises of immortality, immanent justice and centrality in the universe. Religion also provides a social identity, through which people can build meaningful connections with others in the community and with their own history.
Originality/value
A change in the role of religion would be highly relevant for consumer research because religious ideologies shape consumption practices, social relations, products and brands. The authors observe that the content of religious answers is so well-crafted around human psychology that the explaining, relieving and moral functions of religion have not lost reliability. However, cultural change has weakened religion’s ability to gratify human psychology through social identity and meaningful socialization, which led to the marketization of religion, the rise of spirituality and the intensification of socialization around consumption.
Religious marketing has risen substantially over the past two decades due to a confluence of societal changes, notably the freedom to determine one’s faith and the ubiquity of mass media with its ...concomitant advertising. Specifically, branding—a marketing tool whereby a product is given an identity beyond its physical attributes or services—is now being employed by an increasing number of Churches. Two recent branding campaigns—one by the Church of Scientology, the other by the United Methodist Church—provide case studies of how Churches are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of marketing. Beyond simply promoting their products, these campaigns use branding to solve multiple marketing issues, from improving a sagging public reputation to re-positioning traditional denominations.
Traditional religious institutions have been slow to adapt to the new media environment and its marketing potential. This online space requires interaction with congregants and prospects, which is ...fundamentally opposed to the traditional top-down commandment framework these organizations are used to. Though many institutions have come to embrace media forms and even outright promotional messages, the vast majority seem still unsure how best to implement marketing strategies particularly when it comes to the online and social media environment. Evangelical churches have been most successful in using this medium by implementing a combination of consumer research and online savvy including congregations in Second Life, bible apps, virtual pews, and streaming video sermons. Slower to come to these marketing forms have been the more traditional churches. This is due to a confluence of issues: bureaucracy, lack of experience with technology, tradition and needing to appease a number of stakeholders being key among them. One exception is the Episcopal Church, which has come to embrace new media while maintaining their traditional roots. This paper will examine the landscape of social media marketing as used by "untraditional" churches in the United States and what traditional faiths have come to realize they, too, must implement in order to remain part of the cultural conversation in the midst of dwindling attendance figures.
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