Social Media & Marketing

"Heyyy girl! I am an ambassador for *insert random skincare or haircare brand here* and it has absolutely changed my life. I wanted to reach out because I know you'd do an amazing job, and I want to share this experience with you! Are you interested in joining the team? I swear you won't regret it All you have to do is recruit two people, and then once they recruit more people, you'll make money!" ...Has anyone else received this type of message from some random girl you used to go to high school with? If so, you have most likely witnessed someone falling victim to the classic "pyramid scheme" setup. The scheme is simple, yet incredibly effective. It employs the same iconic idea that Faberge Organics shampoo advertised in the late 1970s—"you'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on..." (Li & Bernoff, p. 130). Sound familiar? That is because pyramid schemes utilize the strategy of energizing ...

Whether it's the fantastic new Mexican restaurant up the street where "you've gotta try the homemade guac", or the new sneakers you bought that are "cute but really weirdly narrow in the toe",  we all have opinions that we want to share with the rest of the world. When making a decision, most of us trust the opinions of our peers, and those opinions can have a large impact on the success of any brand. Like Ricardo Guimarães says, "brands belong to customers, not companies" (Li & Bernoff, 78). Since there is so much useful feedback generated by the consumers of any given product, it is advantageous for companies to gather those opinions, compliments, and criticisms so they may cater to the needs of their customers.  There are several ways that companies can gather that data: purchase data from marketing research firms like Nielsen or IMS Health, gather info through surveys via mail, phone, or internet, or conduct focus groups (Li & Bernoff, ...

I'm sure we all remember April of this past year when COVID-19 sent everything into complete lockdown. Only banks and grocery stores were open for business. Some towns even had enforced curfews at night. Life was so drastically different than it had been just a few weeks earlier, and as we collectively stared at our televisions and cell phones (because there was literally nothing better to do), we also observed a drastic shift in commercial content: All of a sudden, every single ad that appeared on our televisions & phones was talking about coronavirus, and they were talking about it in the exact same way . It's almost comical how similar the commercials were, as if every company's marketing team logged into the same Zoom meeting to brainstorm the same blueprint. The ads consisted of families together at home, hardworking essential personnel on the front lines, and reassuring buzzwords such as "together", "safe", and "trust".  These ads wer...

I will say, it's a bit daunting to write a post when you don't know who is going to read it. I feel like I'm talking into the void without a real sense of who is listening. I'm already familiar with the concept of oversharing on the internet—we've all been doing it for years now on social media—but tailoring my rhetoric to a graduate-level communications class takes a bit more effort and creativity. Since this first post is just supposed to be about me, I guess there's no wrong way to do it. So here we go: My name is Anna Friberg and I am a 21-year-old Clark student studying Spanish with a minor in Sociology. I'm also working on my accelerated Master's degree in Communications, hence enrollment in this class. • • • My resume is currently quite short, since COVID ruined some internship possibilities for me this summer, but I did spend the fall semester of my junior year abroad in Seville, Spain. I lived with a widowed woman named Carmen who didn't spe...