The PRAM concentration in the Strategic Communications Major includes courses on public relations, advertising, and marketing. Although the terms are similar, and often get used interchangeably, public relations, advertising, and marketing are not the same. According to Business News Daily:
Freedman, M. (2023, October 20). Advertising vs. marketing vs PR: What's the difference? Business News Daily. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com
/10593-advertising-vs-marketing-difference.html
Generation Alpha: born after 2010
Generation Z: born between 1997 and 2012
Millennials: born between 1981 and 1996
Generation X: born between 1965 and 1980
Baby Boomers: born between 1946 and 1964
"Generational marketing is a strategic approach that involves segmenting audiences by age groups and targeting them based on the values and experiences that resonate with their generational cohort."
Sprout Social. (n.d.). The generational marketing playbook: How to engage every age group on social.
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/guides/
generational-marketing/
"Consumer research is done with the intention of understanding the needs or behaviors of a particular group in order to define who to best market a product or service to, also known as identifying a target market" (Burclaff, 2024).
You can group customers by: age/generation, geography, values, lifestyle, and other factors. Attitudes, habits and preferences are generally collected via interviews, surveys, polling, focus groups, and by other means. Ideas for finding information about a specific consumer group:
Consumer demographics can be categorized by:
Burclaff, Natalie. (2024, February 23). Doing Consumer Research: A Resource Guide. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/consumer-research/.
The additional databases and resources below will help you to better understand a customer base:
Private and public U.S and international business data, industry news, facts and figures, executive contact information, and industry data.
Data sources for industries in countries around the world. Visit the Getting Started Guide for more information.
Audacious is a battle cry for those who refuse to be ignored. In these pages, you’ll explore the electrifying tales of brands that defied norms, shattered expectations, and transcended a pandemic of dull to become legendary. You’ll learn practical strategies to disrupt three critical elements of your brand story: the narrative, the platform, and the storyteller.
Bigger Than This challenges companies - from startups to Fortune 100s - to (re)discover their spark and connect with today's consumers on a deeper level.
Now, the classic resource for connecting with customers has been fully revised and updated, making it even more powerful to prepare you for today's challenges. In Building a StoryBrand 2.0, Donald Miller teaches marketers and business owners to use his fully revised system of the seven universal elements of powerful stories to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses.
Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this book provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes.
Marketing guru Lindstrom presents the startling findings from his three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy.
In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos. The book combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories.
Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.
In The Experience Maker, Dan Gingiss teaches that creating a remarkable experience for customers will ensure they become a company's best marketers and salespeople. By learning from the successes of other companies and applying the proprietary WISER method (Witty, Immersive, Shareable, Extraordinary, Responsive), managers and executives learn to create remarkable experiences that their customers will want to talk about with friends, family, and social media followers.
In For the Culture, Marcus Collins argues that true cultural engagement is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behavior. To effectively engage with communities we first need to think hard about what we will contribute to those communities.
The United States is currently home to six generations of people: -the Silents, born 1925-1945; -Baby Boomers, born 1946-1964; -Gen X, born 1965-1979; -Millennials, born 1980-1994; -Gen Z, born 1995-2012; -and the still-to-be-named cohorts born after 2012. They have had vastly different life experiences and thus, one assumes, they must have vastly diverging beliefs and behaviors. But what are those differences, what causes them, and how deep do they actually run?
This book will guide you through the steps necessary to build a brand from the ground up: Step 1 (Chapter 1) : Create a brand platform. Step 2 (Chapter 2) : Devise a brand name. Step 3 (Chapter 3) : Design your brand's identity. Step 4 (Chapter 4) : Craft your brand atmosphere touch points.
"In this highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini - the seminal expert in the field of influence and persuasion- explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles ethically in business and everyday situations.
Other people's behavior has a huge influence on everything we do, from the mundane to the momentous. Berger integrates research and thinking from business, psychology, and social science to focus on the subtle, invisible influences behind our choices as individuals.
This book by internationally-acclaimed researcher and speaker Sarah Weise will teach you the new rules for marketing and brand-building for Generation Z. Packed with stories and insights from dozens of youth research projects, you'll find out what you need to know about how this next generation of customers wants to learn, transact, and engage with brands like yours.
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? Educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the "human scale principle," using the "Velcro Theory of Memory," and creating "curiosity gaps."
Path-finding author Mark Schaefer provides an achievable and realistic framework to help you stay ahead of the curve by re-imagining marketing in a world where hyper-empowered consumers drive the business results.
Measure What Matters is about using objectives and key results (OKRs), a revolutionary approach to goal-setting, to make tough choices in business.
In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast... Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth.
In The Perfect Story, Karen Eber - leadership consultant, professional keynote storyteller, and TED speaker - shares the science of storytelling to teach you to leverage the five factory settings of the brain to hack the art of storytelling; build a toolkit of endless story ideas; define the audience for your story, and more.
The founders of a respected Silicon Valley advisory firm study legendary category-creating companies and reveal a groundbreaking discipline called category design. Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time.
In Purple Cow, Seth Godin urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable. It's a manifesto for marketers who want to help create products that are worth marketing in the first place.
If you've ever struggled to craft a powerful message that really hits the spot, you'll know its harder than it looks ... Designed to help anyone who works with words improve their writing, this book is packed with practical techniques and features effective exercises to pump up your persuasive powers.
Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems... It's time to stop lying, spamming, and feeling guilty about your work. It's time to stop confusing social media metrics with true connections. It's time to stop wasting money on stolen attention that won't pay off in the long run. It's time to be seen by first learning how to see.
The Public Relations Handbook contains valuable guidance for navigating the 2020s and beyond. This new 5th edition examines and prescribes how to make public relations indispensable in an era facing new challenges in global public health as well as the convergence of new financial, economic, political, and societal issues.
Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines. Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see, and hear - online and off. Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I'm tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I'm going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.
In Upstream Marketing, authors Tim Koelzer and Kristin Kurth share best practices, research, case studies, and analysis informed by their more than twenty years of experience helping transform client brands and businesses through their work at EquiBrand Consulting, a top management consultancy.