So, you are one of those courageous and enthusiastic students who decided to make out what marketing really is and why everyone everywhere is talking about it. Indeed, you can be proud of yourself.
Experience shows that in most cases people who insert the word “marketing” in their speech don’t realize the whole scale of phenomena and processes which it covers. As a result of sticking to some naive misconceptions, both sellers and consumers might have wrong ideas of how they should behave on the market. Here by “market” we mean trade in particular goods.
Consequently, what sellers and consumers get may fall below their expectations and have a rather negative impact on the relationship between them. The consumers’ situation is actually much better. They can simply go to another provider of products or services they need. But what about those unlucky sellers?
They need you! A well-versed marketing specialist, who can show them the right straight way to success.
Okay, hope that’s just been a decent motivation for you to brace yourself and start working on your research project in Marketing. It can become a good theoretical basis for your further investigations into the issue you’re most interested in.
Besides, your research paper should and will be your actual effort to apply the theory in practice in order to answer the questions your project is devoted to. That will teach to work with new information and use it, along with your own creativity and wit, to solve current issues at work. So, make sure spending your time on writing a research paper in Marketing will turn out a good investment into your future career.
Now that’s definitely enough with motivation. (People can waste days on it, can’t they?) Let’s move to the list of topics for your impressive paper.
Analysis of Marketing Strategies (with an Example of Their Successful Implementation)
For this project you’ll need to find a few bright illustrations of what world’s best-known companies do to achieve their goals and keep ranking high in their niches. But at first check some general information about the company: its owners, profit, novelties. This will help you understand better what you’re going to deal with. So, search for the recipes of success from Apple, Walmart, Volkswagen or Coca-Cola.
The further writing algorithm is quite simple. You can start with giving a definition to the term “strategy” in marketing context and go on with categorizing and analyzing different strategies. Check the classifications that other researchers offer and provide yours if you feel it could help you present the topic better.
That all is going to be the theoretical background for your analysis of particular company’s strategies. Select the most essential ones and prove their efficiency by providing valid facts and statistics. Based on the marketing strategies you’ll highlight, conclude with stating which of them can be universal for business of any kind.
Branding and the Way It Influences Customers
Nowadays it’s an integral part of marketing. But in some cases branding may acquire a considerable power, which makes it an independent phenomenon and activity.
In your research paper you can dig much deeper than the definition of brand and the history of the most profitable brands allow. Why not focus on how brands are created, how they develop and survive? The most progressive marketing specialists of today claim that certain patterns of brand building and promoting are typical and hence can work equally effectively for many spheres.
What’s more, a brand is always customer-oriented. It must be. So, it can’t help being one of the most influential factors, determining consumers’ preferences on the market. Obviously, the brand has a psychological component, which is probably at the core of many principles of brand creation.
Consider this idea when doing research on branding. Don’t forget to set some examples of famous companies that successfully manage to direct their brands towards customers, foreseeing and meeting their needs. Also, pay attention to the ways how companies do that.
Essential Aspects of Marketing Ethics
Christopher Penn, Vice President of Shift Communications, noted in one of his eloquent blog posts that ethical marketing is about “creating the maximum amount of good possible” and removing any possible harm that may be generated by business activity and its results.
Nowadays Mr. Penn is officially acknowledged as one of the world’s best and most influential marketers. Just so you know, his extensive expertise now benefits such large companies as McDonald’s and Citrix Systems. Probably, to some extent his success is determined by his ethical convictions – he believes that what he does must be maximally good for people.
Try to develop this thought in your research paper. Also, you can include some meditations on whether the marketing end (which is the common good, speaking roughly) justifies the means a marketer applies. Christopher Penn seems to consider that it does. It’s your turn to speak out.
Interconnections Between Marketing and Social Media
They are obvious and direct. You’ve definitely come across the abbreviation SMM, which actually stands for Social Media Marketing. Yes, you’re right! It’s a way to promote a business via websites and social networks.
SMM is now gaining understandable popularity. Certainly, this is a topical issue to study. So, you can carry out some thorough research into its advantages, list and analyze them. That’s quite a large-scale piece of work for your project. Also, you can compare SMM with more traditional ways of promoting products and services, like advertising.
Use social media content as a ground material for your investigations. Content management is one of the crucial facets of SMM. It will provide you with enough food for thought: you can explore strategies of product presentation, ways of interaction between a company and its customers online, approaches to promotion of company’s novelties and many others.
Application of Psychological Approaches in Marketing (with Examples)
A good marketing specialist must be a good psychologist. As everything such experts do is always oriented to people, the knowledge of how human minds work plays a very important part in their successful work. So, if you happen to be kind of interested in psychology, make sure such interest will only help you to write an impressive research paper.
Consumer’s psychology is a very wide and deep topic to discuss. Let’s check what’s really worth the focus. Most compelling issues relate to the various patterns of person’s behavior, defined, but not limited, by the commercial environment. So, what you can choose from?
- Customer’s decision-making process and the factors it depends on (consider gender and age, for example)
- Categorization principles, which are closely connected with the functioning of mental concepts and therefore with brain activity
- Diffusion of innovations, explaining the ways how and the reasons why new ideas, technologies, products spread (by the way, you can relate it to the issue of brand creation)
- Information search and consumer research methods, which are crucial for marketers’ analysis of customers’ preferences and needs
- Buyer’s motivations and the mechanisms they base on (simply put, that’s the question of why people desire to purchase things).
The Impact of Language on Product and Service Identity
Definitely, it’s not enough to show a beautiful picture of the most innovative smart-phone to a consumer in order to make them just fall in love with the gadget. They’ll stare at the pic. They’ll like it. But they’ll ask: “So what? What can this thing do? Why do you think I need it?” The consumers want words to describe what they see.
Smart marketing can never go without smart use of language. What’s more, language strategies lay foundation for marketing strategies. So, you can even combine these two topics in your paper. Linguistic structures and framings have a direct influence on the way customers perceive and recognize brands, as well as products or services presented by them.
In this context, a concept of product/service identity generates considerable interest. Experience shows that people tend to characterize products with the same words as they use to characterize each other. That’s why a wittily described product can activate the mental associative chain and hence get connected to a certain mental concept, create a clear image.
But that’s what any brand strives to! Highlight this idea in your writing.
Considering a Culture in Global Product Promotion
Large international corporations always face the necessity to adapt the presentation of their products to local cultures. Those of them who do it smartly win. But this victory is usually brought by professional marketers.
As you’re going to join their files soon, you should remember that a farsighted marketing specialist can never pin their hopes on globalization. It’s really taking place, but it’s unlikely to ever make all people perceive the reality in a similar way.
Since childhood we get used to certain unique symbols, beliefs, concepts, which are featured by our native cultures. Even though we can understand and accept other cultures, it doesn’t mean that we can easily allow them to interfere in our reality and start modifying it. Good marketers know that.
When product promotion is oriented to another country and, consequently, another culture, these specialists should take many specific details into account, starting with colors and finishing with children’s cartoon characters.
So, you can see that the topic is really compelling. And if you want to add more flavor to it, set a few examples of companies that failed to promote their products in the international market.