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- All Subjects: Marketing
- Creators: Department of Information Systems
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
store. This store will perfect the personal styling experience by utilizing customer and
apparel data to make individualized apparel recommendations. The format of this store
will heavily reduce the amount of search time for customers by only showing clothing
pieces that each person is likely to purchase, based on predictive analytics. In order to
plan this business model and determine whether a company of this style could be
successful, this paper includes research on the current environment of the fashion
industry, the company’s potential target market segmentation, and tactics for developing
the best customer offering.
As I researched and conducted initial analysis for this project, I quickly ran into a few roadblocks that lead to me needing to pivot off of certain ideas and adapt my initial plans to fit what was actually being done in the current marketing environment. In reality, most businesses are not up for taking the risk of explicitly giving real metrics of their products and services to customers. Due to this, my thesis evolved into finding other ways that companies would use logical appeals to represent their products and comparatively analyze how these companies choose to represent themselves on a social media platform.
Through research from case studies and professional interviews, it can be shown that those who fail and become victim to the e-commerce giants are those who do not allocate enough budget and resources to allow e-commerce to succeed; they do not correctly utilize data throughout the creation of their e-commerce site nor their marketing, have a vast lack of knowledge, and ultimately do not adapt to trends in e-commerce.
E-commerce giants are those who lead in the world-wide e-commerce revolution. They have entered a market and have caused/are continuing to cause instability for those who have not adapted or changed. These e-commerce giants do not have to be “giant” in size; rather, they are making giant changes that allow them to be successful within the industry. They are the prime examples of how e-commerce and data-driven marketing can be successful.
My research shows in order to successfully practice e-commerce, companies must adapt the best practices shown by these giants: owning your data, developing a strong budget for data-driven marketing, investing in the technology and people needed to implement a sound strategy, training employees in basic data, utilizing data in all aspects of marketing, creating an easy online experience that using AB Testing, hosting post mortem meetings to identify successes and failures, understanding your customers, creating the appropriate customer segmentation, nixing the “one fits all” strategy, and never getting too comfortable. If a company is stagnant, they are behind.
We conducted a survey to test consumer's perception and understanding of advertisements promoting financial instruments to see if advertisements that have run without contest from the Federal Trade Commission still have the ability to be deceptive or lack disclosure. We provided a variety of advertisements for markets such as automobiles and rent-to-own businesses. Each one of these advertisements dealt with a different financial instrument so that we could accurately test the knowledge of respondents. We collected 95 complete responses and 23 partial responses from our distribution of this survey.
Advertisements for financial instruments such as car loans, title loans, and rental agreements create the complex problem of presenting substantial loan agreement terms while also keeping an advertisement light and inviting. There are two main types of rules concerning how these advertisers can promote their products: regulation and guidance. Regulation is the official set of laws governing what can or must be said in an advertisement. Guidance is official suggestions of proper advertising practices that is not tied to written laws. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) controls regulation for the required disclosure in these advertisements and requires all material loan terms to be stated “clearly and conspicuously; however, advertisers still put important loan information in hard to see fine print, making it difficult for the consumer to understand the advertisement. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in charge of creating guidance, enforcing advertising regulation and preventing advertisements from becoming deceptive, but, due to the ambiguous nature of disclosure formatting requirements, many transgressions go uninhibited.
We conducted a survey to test consumer's perception and understanding of advertisements promoting financial instruments to see if advertisements that have run without contest from the Federal Trade Commission still have the ability to be deceptive or lack disclosure. We provided a variety of advertisements for markets such as automobiles and rent-to-own businesses. Each one of these advertisements dealt with a different financial instrument so that we could accurately test the knowledge of respondents. We collected 95 complete responses and 23 partial responses from our distribution of this survey.
The results show that the average consumer does not have a complete understanding of financial instruments in the context of these advertisements. These results also demonstrated that consumers are not completely comprehending the information provided to them by these advertisements. We found that in some cases, it was the way that information was provided to the consumer that was causing them to have misconceptions about the information presented. We concluded that there were enough respondents that did not correctly interpret these advertisements to support that there is some misleading and deception by these advertisements despite the lack of context by the FTC. As such, we suggest that current federal guidance be made into official regulation to further prevent these transgressions and further attempts be made to locate and prevent deceptive advertisements.
The purpose of this research is to create a model that will benefit this industry and the many changes to come. As of now, there are limited FTC guidelines which limit the protection of content creators, agencies, and brands. That is when I came up with the idea to develop a model to further improve efficiency of the influencer marketing industry, and to help the entrepreneurs who are leading it. This model provides the framework for a strong start in the influencer marketing industry. Through informational interviews, literary research, field studies, and surveys, the model was developed through the data analysis of each of these tools, based on common themes found within each. This research was conducted from a variety of perspectives, including consumers, brands, agencies, and content creators.
The purpose of this research is to create a model that will benefit this industry and the many changes to come. As of now, there are limited FTC guidelines which limit the protection of content creators, agencies, and brands. That is when I came up with the idea to develop a model to further improve efficiency of the influencer marketing industry, and to help the entrepreneurs who are leading it. This model provides the framework for a strong start in the influencer marketing industry. Through informational interviews, literary research, field studies, and surveys, the model was developed through the data analysis of each of these tools, based on common themes found within each. This research was conducted from a variety of perspectives, including consumers, brands, agencies, and content creators.