Critique

CES 1. Instant Brands in the Age of Social Networking

CRITICAL EVALUATION

At the end of the article, the author concluded with a short guidance that included some recommendations for IMC professionals aiming to gain not only instant popularity of their brands but also to create successful instant brands. This short guidance is for online and offline success, and the author provide advises such as to deliver immediacy and transparency from the seller to the costumer, and to create a memorable product or service experience, among others. All of these are excellent recommendations for brands that want to market themselves online or want to create a stronger bond with its costumers. Nonetheless, this non-empirical article is forgetting to mention the most vital step that an IMC professional should never forget, which is research. Even if it was not mentioned by the author of the article simply because it’s a step that every marketing and advertising professional must follow, it should have been mentioned by the author of the article because research is vital in the creation of new strategies, especially for new media channels. The article mentioned that this new social networking era became a genre of social communication and marketing, in which consumers are not only leading their own wants and needs, but also becoming the judges of good and bad brands that satisfy these wants and needs to new consumers. However, there is a crucial need to understand what makes each advertisement; that has become viral, so good, that we as consumers want to share it, promote it, talk about it and even hunt it down. This happens most likely because we know that the person that recommended the product or service is trustworthy, hence it’s going to be good. We are no longer “forced” to watch paid marketing advertisements of those products or services on TV. Nowadays, with the new social network as a channel, the audience has become the lead promoters and marketers of almost any brand,...