Marketing Research Paper - Essay Example

The answer lies in the cultural sensitivity of coke on how it position its product to its market at a given time and cultural context. To illustrate, we are going to take the old coke commercial at; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ0FRW1W3yA&feature=related. At a first glance, the commercial seems banal and corny which is typical of old commercials. It may even seem meaningless because all it has are just singing of scantily clad woman and sets of men. But if we observe closely on its message, this is where coke’s cultural sensitivity lies that made it appealing to all ages.

Its value proposition was “value” with coke being “big” that every time the consumers in that era buy coke, they get more because coke got “big”. Their enticement was basically consumers get more with the same price and taste and this is aligned with the cultural preference of people towards value during that time. If the same message will be used today as a value proposition to push coke in the market, it will surely fail because the preference of the market is different. In those times, people were not yet conscious of the sugar content of coke that could make an individual fat by drinking it excessively.

In those times, coke is a delicious soda drink only that the purchasing power of the consumers are not yet as powerful compared today because it was the time of early industrial era where people does not earn much. So, value mattered to them for a delicious drink and health does not yet matter. Thus, coke attacked the cultural vulnerability of its consumers to position itself to its prospective market. Now let us move fast forward and observe its new commercial coke zero at this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=_BxDcn3Jw0c. The commercial’s pathos, or emotional persuasion, albeit lacking in ethos or logic, is very powerful because it appeals to the prevailing social desirables such as sexiness, being cool, in addition to its great taste without the sugar. We can also observe that the new social desirables already changed especially with the necessity of being with a special “someone”. Coke managed to fill the modern age emotional vacuity by associating itself with an attractive girl who is helplessly attracted to a guy who prefers coke zero.

Albeit the approach lacks logic or ethos, coke knew that the audience will overlook it in lieu of the stronger rhetoric of its pathos. Another strong case for capitalizing on the cultural context of a given society is its need to look good in order to become socially acceptable and desirable. Virginia Slims cigarette appeals to this cultural need to be beautiful and advertizes its product as a panacea that could fill that need. Virginia Slims cigarette may not explicitly state this in their advertisements but the use of attractive women who are beautiful by the standard of western society exudes the rhetoric of aesthetic appeal that is connected to filling a need for pathos or emotional fulfillment.

The cigarette maker knows that in western culture, particularly America, being loved or desired has the pre-requisite of being physically beautiful in order to attract men. Such, it capitalizes on using women’s image as models which are considered to be beautiful during its particular era that” act as archetypes of beauty and confidence, but also set a standard for such traits, which most women feel