Group Conformity, Opinion Leaders and Peer Pressure

Hello once again, this week in this post, the topic is Groups. When we say groups, straight away in our minds a picture gets created of more than two people whether they are a group of workers, or a team playing a sport. Below is a picture from the program the Apprentice where there is a group of contestants trying to be Sir Alan Sugar's Apprentice.

What is a group? The textbook answer to this question would be that it is an important part of a person's social life. An example of this can be that a group can get influenced by some one's behaviour and in the group one has to influence all sorts of behaviours from the people in the group and as they are more than two people in the group each person is going to be different. Take the picture above for example, when you see the picture above you straight away no that in this you have to be in groups and work as a team, but of course in a group you will have differences and that will be due to the reason of behaviour or shall I say mannerisms of the individual, so conflicts do happen when part of a group.

When you mention the word group, it may seem that its only of one type like where you see more than two people you call them a group, but its not just that. There is much more to it as theoretically there are various different types of groups. One of them is known as something called Aspirational (this type of group is more to do with people having interest in fashion). Second type of group is Peers (That is your friends who you can say have an equal standing and peers can be from school, college or even university). Third one being Acquired (This type relates more towards the work colleagues side or even scouts for a particular club), and finally the last type of group is known as Ascribed (this is the type where you are born into e.g. family, and this is where the gender and social class comes in).

Great news guys......... More Theory coming your way regarding this topic :). Right enough of my poor jokes, and moving on to the theories regarding this topic. The main one being the theory of Social Comparison. Basically it influences the need of the groups and also it looks at the behaviour of the individuals in the group for them to provide a guideline for their evaluation of themselves. This theory also makes individuals in the group also learn about the type of ability they have and also the attitudes that is when they compare themselves to other people.

Following rules and regulations are also a certain type of expectation which a group represents.

Hope this post was useful and any comments or feedbacks on this post please feel free to comment.

Gender

Hello people, today I am going to talk about Gender, as this is what my last lecture was about. Below is a picture of the two genders Male and Female.

By looking at this picture, the first thing which came to my mind was competition, as the way the two people of different genders are looking at each other seems like that they are trying to show that which one is superior. In the lecture our lecturer told us about the difference between genders and the first thing our lecture discussed with us was how the male gender can impress a woman. Below is a video link giving an example of how to impress a woman.

I have chosen this video clip because discussion on how to impress a woman, would be more affective if a woman explains how she would like to be impressed, so the clip chosen by me above shows a woman talking about how a guy should impress a woman.

In class things which we discussed were that little things like buying woman some flowers, boxes of chocolate, spending quality time with her, have a cuddle, supporting her (small things like that) are very common but very affective in impressing a woman, also explained by our lecturer was that if these small affective things are not achieved by guys, then the women feel lonely and that causes them to question their guys in why they are ignoring or not doing these things (the word which will be suitable for this line is nagging). All this may seem easy that these little things can be achieved but, in the real world its more difficult and there are many cases out there where a guy fails to impress a woman and in return gets dumped, hated or nagged.

Below are two pictures of two different scenarios, one being that a guy has impressed a woman and the other where he has not.

This picture shows that both the guy and the girl are happy and this shows that the guy has impressed the girl and in return the girl is happy and enjoying the guy's company. So all ends well with a drink of wine.

I chose this picture for the guy failing to impress, because suppose the guy dancer gets the dance move wrong on stage that would embarrass the guy itself but the above most it will embarrass the woman, and as women are sensitive so the impression of the guy can go wrong and due to one bad dance move, the woman can not be impressed.

If you think this discussion was over, well you thought wrong, this was only the first half, second half was yet to come that is of how to impress a man. Well me being a guy and most of the guys in the class agreed to the discussion which happened or shall I say some part of the discussion. as the ladies in the class gave two main points in how a woman can impress a guy is by a girl stripping or just cooking the guys some hot delicious food. The guys in the class agreed with the food option but only a few agreed to the stripping bit, as from my personal view of it is that female should not only be there to impress a guy by stripping as that can come under discrimination and its a big negative, but majority of the guys agreed to it, was well shocking. Below is a picture of the two things the females in the class said that guys will be impressed with.

I have chosen this picture because even if it is black and white and is a very old picture, this shows that from that generation till now its the same thing that a way to impress a guy is by the woman serving food on the guy's plate and as long as that keeps happening the guy will be happy.

This picture of course of a half-naked woman (a model) stating that a guy would be impressed if a girl has a figure like this young beautiful lady above and basically just literally (I won't say), it should be understandable.

This was not all, after the discussion of how to impress a guy and a woman, the next thing which we moved onto was an activity as our lecturer showed the class a picture of a room which had items in it. All of us looked at the pictured and then gave our feedback on to what we remember from the picture. The end result was that our lecturer told us that the girls have a memory of remembering little things like books, flowers and many of those items and guys remember the big stuff like big sofa (furniture) and bookshelves and many more.

Moving on to the theory side of things relating to the topic of gender, is that our lecturer told us differences in advertisement. From one of the textbooks I read I remember that one of the theorists (Solomon) wrote that in society, the role of men and women are showed to us viewers in terms of behaving ideally which are stressed for both the genders in advertising. For example what kind of advert will a woman be interested in? In my personal view a woman will be attracted to a beauty product advert or a healthy snack (relating to diet) advert or even the clothes advert, whereas a guy will be attracted to adverts which relate to sports like sportswear or deodorants (how to impress women - good odour). Below are two video links one of them an advert targeting women and the other one targeting men.

This advert above was chosen by me for the women viewers because first of all it has Cheryl Cole and as she is looked up to as a role model by young girls and even older women so what ever product she endorses would be a watched by women especially this advert as every one likes nice hair and as Cheryl Cole is promoting the L'oreal advert sending the message to the women if you buy this product your hair will look as beautiful and silky as Cheryl Cole's hair.

The advert above is targeting the men, and this popular advert of Gillete Fusion series has been chosen by me because I feel that sport even though women are these days part of every single sport but this advert has got likes of Roger Federer, Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry and them endorsing the product of shaving shows that the way these guys play smoothly in their sport thats how smoothly a guys skin would feel once he has shaved with Gillette Fusion.

Differentiating between the two genders can be influenced by there responses to the marketing side of things. An example can be like guys are not as sensitive to women when watching a TV Commercial. Below is a link to an advert on binge drinking, it features a young guy but seeing this advert women will still be sensitive or shall I say react to this advert when they see it.

Finally a theoretical statement to end this blog that advertising in the media sector plays a pivotal role when it comes to socialising the male and female consumers. Basically the role of women in advertising has disseminated whereas the role of men have not been portrayed shall I say with accuracy either in the media.

Any Comments on this blog, please feel free to comment or give any suggestions.

Enterprise Week

Hellooooooo guys, sorry about the long gap between my previous post and this one. But I am back and wish all of you a very Happy New Year.

Moving from one Festival of Christmas and New Year to something called Enterprise Festival. Basically at Bucks New Uni. Enterprise Festival or what us students called it (Enterprise Week) ran for 3 weeks from 9th November 2009 till 27th November 2009.

This event was a really good motivator for the students as each event had something in it to help the students in what they are doing or which could help them in future. The events which I was able to attend were 'Telling it Like it is' and 'Transmitting Information is easier than creating understanding'. The first one I mentioned was where ex-students came and spoke about what they are doing now and what have they achieved from doing there degree. It was really helpful because, this gave me personally a good chance to speak to those students after it was finished and get information of the companies they are working for and if in future can be doing work experience, overall a very helpful event this was. The second event I went to was a really good experience for me regarding my degree course as I am doing marketing and as I am interested in doing advertising management from my Second Year, this event really helped me as five people from different agencies came and had a question time debate with them, got lots and lots of information from these people from these agencies. Below are the names of the people and the agencies they are from and with the link to their agency's website also a picture of the person and the picture of the company's logo.

1.) Sue Elms - She is the Executive Vice President of Global Media Practice Millward Brown

http://www.millwardbrown.com/Home.aspx

2.) George Hutchinson - He is the Chair and Managing Director of Public Affairs for Burson-Marsteller UK

http://www.bursonmarsteller.co.uk/index.php

3.) Sue Unerman - She is the Chief Strategy Officer for MediaCom

http://mediacom.com/ 

4.) Matthew Chapman - He is the International Service and Systems Innovation Director for Billets

http://www.ebiquity.com/uk/billetts/

5.) Rik Haslam - He is the Group Creative Architect for WWV Rap

http://www.rapp.com/home/

Moving on to what exactly happened in this particular event. There were loads of discussions, one of them being that over the past few years how communication has developed and straight away the most common mean of communication being the Internet was discussed and how it has taken over. I noted down some statistics which the panel discussed and they said that the researchers have shown that around about 80-85% of marketeers have stated that they use mobile marketing through the internet and the reason they give it as most people do that it is very easy to access.

A student from the third year did a presentation about how the use of Internet has increased. In his presentation he mentioned that around about three thousand and nine million adverts appear on the most famous internet search engine Google and listening to him give this fact it indicates how this mean of communication that is the internet has increased and is the most used and popular mean of communication all over the world.

Also looking at the notes I made on the day of this discussion, I remember that Sue Unerman (Chief Strategy Officer for MediaCom) mentioned about how the businesses will lose up to £10,000 by advertising online if the message they are trying to give is not clear enough and also if the advertisements are not targeted on the related websites.

In the second half of the discussion, Brands were discussed. Mostly every one in the panel said literally the same thing that what do customers want from a product, and the reply was that the customer want the value of a product and it should be of high quality no matter what the price or what ever brand it is. An example one of the panel member gave was on the branded chocolate (Cadbury) and the member said that this brand of chocolate adds value to its products and that is by ensuring that the brand adds a bit of fun and brings in more adventure for its customers. Also the experts in the panel made an important point by mentioning that something called a tight control brand is still working these days. An example to this the experts gave was of the packaging of the famous L'Oreal and they said that to most of the customers the packaging is not the most appealing factor but it still is a very popular brand.

At the end of this event, I really thought that discussions like these are really important for a student, it really was useful to me personally as it gave me a lot of main points that the experts spoke about on main things like Branding and the latest leader in Communication (Internet). These notes made on that day really helped me and hopefully the knowledge gained that day would really be useful in near future.

Finally the other events which I wanted to attend but were unable to attend were the Apprentice Challenge. The reason for not being able to be a part of it was that the group I wanted to participate with were not keen watchers of the Apprentice programme and me being the opposite am a fan of the programme so being part of a similar kind of event would have been great but oh well, there is always next time!

Also I wanted to be part of the 24 hour challenge in which the task was to make a tv advert. I was interested in that because during my GCSE's I was studying media and the students studying media, business or IT were to take part in an advert making competition and people from SKY TV came to our school and were gave us instructions that a 30 second advert as to be made promoting SKY Plus which at that time was something which came out new in the market. So my group winning that task made me want to do this 24 hour challenge to because I wanted to put my experience gained during the earlier experience into this, but the bad news was that during this I came down with Swine Flu and was unable to be part of it. Later on I found out from Ruth our lecturer that this challenge was not taking place because not a lot of people signed up for it. Hopefully events like this occur more in the uni and so can be part of it in future.

Once again any comments or feedback on this post, please feel free to comment.