Marketing Papers and Essays

Marketing involve selling the product or idea that is consumer oriented and will satisfy his or her need. In your marketing classes you will often assigned to write term papers, research papers, essays and reports on various topics. To make your term paper successful you will need effectively write your ideas and research on the paper and make them sell your product and in the same time be useful for some particular group of people. If you want your marketing term paper or essay to receive a good grade, you will need to persuade your audience (in your case it will be teacher) that your product or idea is useful and will bring profit, or in other words you will need to sell your product. There are some points that you will need to consider while writing your marketing term paper if you want to make it sound and actually “sell” your product or idea to your teacher.

Sales experts agree that the weighting process requires five basic steps:

1. relating ideas to be sold to audience thoughts, beliefs and attitudes;
2. establishing community of interest;
3. building messages on benefits;
4. demonstrating results; and
5. specifying necessary response.

Ideas and Interests

Persuasion begins with appeals to existing predispositions among message recipients. In preparing messages, you must focus on recipients’ points of view about the product or idea rather than on your own.

This concept applies whether you are selling services or refrigerators in your marketing term paper. Neither is an end in itself. Each is a means to an end. Refrigerators prevent food spoilage. Public relations services enhance organizational communication programs and contribute to overall organizational objectives.

Community of Interest

Your primary efforts must be directed toward inducing interest in end results. You must deal with message recipients in terms of reduced food spoilage or improved profit rather than refrigerators or public relations. Messages that address recipient needs necessarily create strong motivation for response.

Needs are not always evident to message recipients. As demographic trends started creating shortages of nurses, computer specialists, and others in the 1980s, for example, employers first responded with higher wages and stronger recruiting efforts. They failed to recognize that wages alone would not do the job; that basic change in human resources and communications systems were necessary to improve personnel recruitment and retention. Those who pointed out how pertinent services would solve organizational problems prospered as a result.

Two principles become operational in such circumstances. Offers to satisfy needs carry emotional as well as motivational appeals. Successful writers involve message recipients emotionally by demonstrating understanding of their needs.

Building on Benefits

Persuasion, by definition, involves reward for action. If you want your marketing term paper, research paper or essay to be successful you should recognize and act on that principle. You should specify rewards in response to message recipients’ primary question: “What’s in it for me?” Rewards vary with individuals and circumstances involved. In business settings, however, many rewards involve one or more of a dozen major motivators:

Saving time or money
Enhancing reputation
Increasing profits
Gaining loyalty
Reducing work loads
Enhancing efficiency
Improving productivity
Solving problems
Improving quality
Avoiding problems
Protecting jobs
Achieving higher status

Successful writers use these and similar appeals to engage the interests of readers, to respond immediately to that primary question, and to induce careful consideration of messages they send.

Demonstrating Results

The next step in the process is relatively simple: Demonstrate results. While you can’t provide “test drives” in your marketing paper, you can accomplish the next best thing: concise verbal descriptions of benefits involved.

Specifying Responses

All that remains is to close the sale. Closing involves telling the reader what needs to be done and how to do it to achieve the benefits described. Decisions are made easier, behavioral scientists have demonstrated, when decision makers are shown how to act on concepts involved.

Additional Factors

Several other points should be kept in mind in your marketing term paper or essay. Most important: Keep communication simple. Stay with a single concept. Multiple subjects should be dealt with in multiple letters, memoranda, or reports.

Equally important: Use understandable language. Wording should be familiar to message recipients who will read your paper. Words, sentences, and paragraphs should be short and easily read. Jargon should be avoided at all costs. Accomplishing these objectives requires that writers be knowledgeable in subject matter. Credibility is at risk unless writers know their subjects.