Toward the building of a social/consumption simulation model, the objectives of this chapter are to understand in detail the practice of advertising communication through a framework aiming at quantification, to elucidate the goals and techniques of advertising communication, and to create a model for advertising communication strategies. First, the advertising communications goals, the advertising communications techniques, the motivations to become involved, and the consumer-generated contents are categorized. Next, the relationships between these categorized items are identified. Finally, the typical advertising communications strategies are identified and organized into three types models (two types of sender-driven strategies and one type of receiver-driven strategy). These models can be utilized to establish strategic rules for social simulations that include both senders and receivers of advertising.
TopIntroduction
As internet use has become more widespread, the flow of information through the use of consumer generated media (CGM) such as blogs and Twitter (Consumers to Corporations, Consumers to Consumers) has increased alongside the use of traditional mass media sources such as TV, newspapers, and leaflets (Corporations to Consumers). More and more energy is being put into attempts to utilize CGM in marketing strategies (Ikeo, 2003; Yamazaki, 2005; Ijichi, 2006; Ito, 2007) and a wide variety of “trial-and-error” style attempts are expected to continue in the foreseeable future. At the same time, the use of CGM has made it easier to collect information about consumers and has led to advances in the environment within which the effectiveness of communication is measured (Poynter, 2010; Sterne, 2011). In order for corporations to accurately plan and execute marketing strategies, it is necessary for them to utilize and integrate a variety of effectiveness measures that allow data collection using the CGM environment, and they must be able to quantitatively assess and analyze these attempts.
The Need for Social and Consumption Simulation Models That are Compatible with the CGM Environment
Increasingly active use of CGM communication has led to information cycling between corporations/society and consumers, as well as among consumers themselves, and has led to changes, such as increasing complexity in the structure of social and consumer communication. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict and reproduce communication behaviors. In order to precisely assess, analyze, and predict the communication behaviors that are currently in circulation, it is necessary to carry out simulations based on some type of measurement model to anticipate consumer phenomena. Thus, it is necessary to create a common measurement model (hereafter referred to as the “social/consumption simulation model”) that facilitates both the interpretation/analysis and the prediction of social and consumer phenomena. Social and consumer communication behavior in the CGM communication environment are undergoing dynamic changes that result from the content types produced by consumers and the timing of and related motivations for the release of these contents by consumers. When creating the social/consumption simulation model, it is necessary to model the information contents for the information cycles between corporations/society and consumers as well as among consumers themselves (corporate-generated contents, consumer-generated contents), the time coefficient (timing, frequency), and the driving forces (goals, methods, and strategies of communication as well as consumer-related factors).
Chapter Objective
Toward the building of a social/consumption simulation model, the objectives of this chapter are to understand in detail the practice of advertising communication through a framework aiming at quantification, to elucidate the goals and techniques of advertising communication, and to create a model for advertising communications strategies.
First is an explanation of the framework for the consumer behavior model, based on previous research, which will be used as the basis for this study. Next, the goals of advertising communication, types of media utilized, contents of the information that is being exchanged (corporation-generated contents, consumer-generated contents), and consumer-related motivational factors for advertising communication will be organized into a framework for this model based on advertising practices. The advertising communication techniques and related motivations as well as the consumer-generated contents will be categorized, and the relationships of consumer-generated contents and their related motivations with advertising communication techniques will be identified and described. Finally, there will be an attempt to summarize and create models for typical advertising communication strategies.