1. Understanding the principal methods and techniques used in marketing and public relationships
Marketing:
Why is it important in marketing to understanding your clients and their requirements?
When marketing it’s important that you understand your clients because you need to be able to
make sure you are pitching your product/service to the correct audience, if you don’t and you
advertise your product, it will mean that you are wasting money on something that is highly unlikely
to be sold.
You need to be able to understand what your audience really wants in order to communicate your
idea to the public.
For example, if you are to advertise a woman’s product, i.e. Make up, to a male, the chances of you
selling it are extremely thin.
Why is understanding the market you are working in important? What techniques and tools could
be used to help someone understand their market?
Understanding the market that you are working in is extremely important because if you don’t
understand you could be causing a lot of expensive mistakes. You need to be able to find out if your
audience will be interested in your product/service and to do this you need to have a well-defined
target market.
To be able to understand your market and find out what they want, to do this a range of different
research’s could be conducted, for example, you could create a survey for people to fill in to see what
they think of similar and existing products. This will also help to find out whom different company’s
audiences are for similar product/services. If where to do this, it is likely to help you and your
audience find out information quickly and easily. You could also use online questionnaires, and
snowballing people (targeting random people in the high street to ask). Etc.
What is a SWOT analysis? Why are they are they a useful tool?
A SWOT analysis is a way of looking at your ideas and assessing them in a structured way, it will help
you to find out the strengths of your product/service, weaknesses if you find out these you could
easily improve them before the public find out, any opportunities you have to make your
product/service better and threats coming your way from other companies that may be doing the
same thing.
If you expose all of these early enough, it will help to tackle hard parts and make things better. It will
also help your service to be finished in time instead of having to delay things because of late
realisation and helping your product to be brought out to the audience with all the correct
information with improvements and threats removed.
What is audience profiling? What sort of information might be included in an audience profile?
Audience profiling is highly competitive and you need to be able to fully understand the way in which
your target audience perceives the product/service you are giving as well as your overall position in
the marketing business, if you don’t carry out research for this, you are making time worthy and
costly decisions that may not work out, it is a way to build up your knowledge about an organisation
about typical clients, it tells you their age, location, the life-style they live, their income band,
property value.
It will also help you to be able to build an understanding of how audiences are interacting with your

2. product/service, it will tell you, how often they use/purchase your product/service, how much they
are willing to pay and when, and whether your providing an essential product.
Select a magazine and find their audience profile:
Heat Magazine.
This magazine is a British entertainment magazine which is published by a German company named
Bauer Media Group, it’s one of the UK’s biggest selling magazine’s, with regular circulation and over
half a million sales, it’s mixed with celebrity news, gossip, beauty advice and fashion. It will also
feature things such as movie and music advertisements, and TV listings.
Key Facts
Circulation (January to June 2013) – 241,055
Readership (January to December 2012) – 1,320,000
Frequency – Weekly
Demographics
Median Age – 35
ABC1 – 34%
Median Buyers (Female) – 94%
Lifestyle
“It’s a must have”
“Heat is unique and has a great sense of humour, it has obsessive attention to celebrities”
“Unshakeable joy of gossip, it keeps me coming back for more”
Explain in detail the 4 different elements of the marketing mix.
Product – These are the features and appearance of products/services.
Price – How much customers will pay for a product/service.
Promotion – How much customers have been communicated with the product/service and how
aware they are of them.
Place – where about’s a product/service is being made available to customers.
Select a publication, product or audience and explain the range of marketing materials that they
use.
Heat Magazine, these use a range of different marketing materials to bring their audience closer to
the magazine, it communicates to the audience on a daily basis.
They promote The National Television Awards, SportsPro Media, ITV and more.
Heat Magazine advertisements can also be found on television, sometimes in bus stops and in other
magazines, these all help to promote the magazine well because lots of people will see them because
they will be located in lots of different places, they are also been advertised on day to day public
things.

3. Provide your own definition of advertising.
Advertising is a way of getting a product/service out to the public to make them aware to help raise
sales, it’s a more advanced form of marketing and it helps to encourage and persuade people in to
buying the product/service, sort of like the Hypodermic Syringe, it feeds information in to our brains
of which people will feel they can’t change their mind and it will make them feel as if they need to
buy it because it’s a popular product.
What is the purpose of sponsorship? Support your answer with detailed examples.
Sponsorship is when a large company will support an event, activity, person, organisation or TV
programmes or radio channels, it helps an individual group by giving them more support to become
higher in the marketing business.
Businesses will often pay for
What is the purpose of endorsements? Explain a range of different types of endorsements and use
examples.
The purpose of an endorsement is to get your product/service out to the public; it shows how much
the buyer will pay to a company/group/celebrity in trade of advertisements and showing your
product.
For example, if I where to be endorsed by Coca-Cola, they might give me life time supply of their
product as long as I use their product continuously and make it my own.
Why could holding an event be a good marketing strategy? What are some of the opportunities and
threats of holding an event?
Holding an event can be good for marketing, it will enable potential consumers to be able to see
what a company’s product/service is all about and it gives companies a chance to be able to persuade
people in to thinking that they need their product/service, so this will help to raise sales. Though if
you hold and event and there is more than one company there, this may then be threat because your
potential audience will be seeing another companies product/service as well, and they might be
persuaded in to thinking that theirs is the better option.
What is merchandising? Use detailed examples to help explain.
Merchandising is a practice which helps to contribute to a company’s sale of products or usage of
their service. It refers to a variety of products available for their audience to be able to buy and the
display of products in a way that will gain peoples interests and attention so that customers will want
to make a purchase.

4. Public Relations:
What is the purpose of a press release? What sort of things should a good press release contain?
The purpose of a press release is to provide information to give to the media with the objective of
reaching the public by news coverage. A company, individual or non-profit can often gain valuable
press coverage with no outlay of money other than the costs of writing and printing the release.
A good press release should contain mainly facts to get out to the audience what you are trying to say
so that you can keep their attention.
These are the main things that it should contain if you want your release to be successful:
- Who is the release about?
- What has happened and why it’s news worthy?
- Where did the event take place?
- When did this happen?
- How is it newsworthy?
- Why is it beneficial to the audience?
What is the purpose of an electronic media pack? What sort of things should a good electronic
media pack contain?
The purpose of an electronic media pack is so that people can see the latest news and goings on
whilst they are on the move every second of every day, it enables people to find out the information
that they need quickly and easily.
Electronic media packs usually contain:
- Inform
- Entertain
- Advertise
- Create a transition.
What is the purpose of a PR briefing? Why should you create one? Explain some of the areas a brief
should cover.
The purpose of PR brief is to be able to identify potential problems or items you need in order to
clarify with your client what it is you’re planning on doing. It is also used to help raise public
awareness on a product/service.
To create a good PR brief, it should include some marketing research to help give you a better idea of
who your target audience is, it should also cover:
- Context, you need to have a background to what your writing about and why the subject has
come up, does it fit in with the challenges of business, how does it relate to your competitive
environment?
- Commercial imperative, this is when you build up on the context, a PR brief must be rooted to
the commercial needs of your business
- Purpose, you need give people an idea of why you want media coverage to build your
product/services awareness, you need to tell people why you are targeting a new audience.
- Decision-makers, you need to say who will be involved with the agency, whether you have
agreed on the selection criteria, it is vital that decision-makers have seen and agreed.
- Budget, you need to make sure that you have a clear idea of who your company’s audience is,
you need to be able to make it cover everything you need to pay for.

5. What is the purpose of a press conference? Why might you hold one? Use specific examples to help
you with your response.
The purpose of a press conference is to organise and distribute information to the media via
answering questions from the reporters.Normally, a press conference is led by the company’s
executive management to their specific press liaison.
You may hold one of these to gain media coverage so that people can be made aware of the
product/service. This is a different kind of press coverage.
Why could hand-outs be useful when managing a PR event?
Hand-outs can be a really useful marketing strategy because by giving the audience’s these it will
keep reminding them of a product/service every time they see it, if it is advertising a product, it may
say on it where you can get the product from, it may also come with a money off voucher and it will
also state the price. If it’s a service being advertised, it will give a contact number, location and a
short description of what the service does.
What are some of the advantages of holding an interview instead of a press conference?
An advantage of interviews is that people will be able to say what they like without feeling as if they
are being judged or feeling as if they need to say something that they don’t want because they feel
they have to please others around them. Interviews can also be kept anonymous as well so that
there’s no discrimination.
Why do people set up film and picture opportunities? Use examples to help our response.
People often set up film and picture opportunities to help try and raise public awareness, it can also
sometimes gain press coverage.
For example, if at a marketing event and there’s a product being advertised, and people are just
telling someone else about it, it might not look or sound as good, but if they where to have a handout with a picture of someone happy with the product or maybe a crowd around the product trying
to get close to look at it then this will help to make the service/product look more successful.
Why are contacts and networking important in marketing and PR? What kinds of contacts could be
useful? Provide details of a PR contact from at least one organisation.
Having contacts in marketing and PR can be really useful because if you know someone that’s high up
in the marketing business, they can help to get your product/service more advertisement and help to
raise more awareness of it, in turn, this will help to raise sales of the product/service and make it
become more successful.