The message to be communicated and the targeted audience

My marketing message was to make people want to buy the new Apple noise-cancelling headphones, realise how useful the noise-cancelling technology is, and encourage people to recognise Apple brand not only in terms of the musical players and PC producer, but also in terms of a new company coming onto the noise-cancelling headphones market with the new high quality product. From both of my promotions, it is evident that the message is clear, because it clearly shows the product and brand logo, outlines its main characteristics, as well as allows to understand that Apple is confident that it is a high quality product, by giving it out to people on the airplane to try on, compare to the other similar products, and enjoy the usefulness and high quality of the product at the place where it is most needed and appropriate. However, the extent to which my marketing communication reaches the target market is limited, because by promoting the new Apple noise-cancelling headphones on the plane, I’m not targeting those people who don’t fly, neither I target people who use other airlines that were not chosen by me due to the relatively high costs of advertising and difficulties with monitoring the promotion on a wider choice of airlines. Although, I decided to use only three airlines to make my method of promotion cost-effective, in the long run it might actually make sense to introduce new Apple noise-cancelling headphones on the other airlines, if it works out well on the first three. This should, in theory, help me to minimise the risk of loosing too much money, if my promotional method doesn’t work out as well as it is expected. There might also be some people who can afford to buy the new Apple headphones, but they might not necessarily have enough money to fly, which again implies that my marketing communication is bias, cannot reach all of the target market and is not perfect. However, if we consider the costs of advertising on the airplane and the number of target audience that can be potentially reached, in comparison to alternative sources of advertising and promotion such as Radio, TV, Posters and Internet, we should be able to see that advertising on the airplane is more cost-effective, even though it doesn’t reach all of the target market unlike TV and Radio, which are likely to get the message across a larger number of people, a certain percentage of whose might be my target market, but it will be very expensive in terms of the cost per person.

Moving onto the promotional budget section, I have conducted some further research to find out the cost of my proposed promotional campaign and it’s effectiveness in terms of cost per person, in comparison to TV, Radio, Internet, Cinema, and Posters, taking into the account current marketing budgets of Apple Inc.

Country	Airline	Name of the magazine	Passengers in 2006	Circulation	Audience	Periodicity	Cost
France	Air France	Air France Magazine	50,464,873	386,019	1,128,000	Monthly	£19,838.46
Germany	Lufthansa	Lufthansa Magazin	54,164,071	604,990	1,385,000	Monthly	£25,808.37
UK	British Airways	Business Life	33,588,960	93,087	628,000	Monthly	£8,536.00
Total:			138,217,904	1,084,096	3,141,000		£54,182.83

Above are the costs of advertising in the in-flight magazines. If we take the total cost and divide it by the audience, we will obtain the cost per person, which will be à

£54,182.83/3,141,000= £0.02 per person

I assume, that I will be advertising for 1 year, therefore, the costs will be (£54,182.83x12)= £650,194

• Therefore, the cost of the proposed campaign will be: £650,194

However, there are several options with this, because the cost of my proposed promotional campaign may actually be nothing, if I pay for advertising the new Apple noise-cancelling headphones in the in-flight magazine, but sell these headphones an airline for money, which should cover the costs of advertising, because according to my research on average there are 219 seats in the airplane, which means that, for instance- three of my airlines altogether have about 100 airplanes and with the given price of e.g. £30 and an average of 219 seats in each airplane, there’s a possibility to generate £ 657,000 of revenue, which will fully cover the costs of advertising in the in-flight magazines, and in addition to this, I will be able to collect £ 2.00 per person for renting the headphones, provided there’s has been a successful negotiation with an airline.

(Revenue= 100 airplanes x 219 Seats on planes, and then times £30 price= £ 657,000)

• It will reach approximately about 37,692,000 people over the year

• Cost per person will be £650,194/37,692,000= £0.017= £0.02 (approx.)

• The data provided above clearly suggests that the costs of advertising on the airplane in terms of how many people it can actually reach are not that high at all, and it turns out to be 2p per person. Even, if the annual cost is £650,194 the number of people that it can approximately reach is above 37 million, which although it is fairly inaccurate, is still a very impressive figure. However, although I assume that according to the information provided by the IPSIS international, there are 37 million passengers a year, this figure in some cases might be bigger, if we take into the account those passengers to travel more than once or frequent flyers.

· According to “Macblogz” Apple’s marketing budget for 2008 was $486M, which is £353 million (http://www.macblogz.com/2008/11/22/apples-entire-ad-budget-486m-compared-to-vistas-300m/), which suggest that my proposed promotional strategy would only be either nothing, if the option of selling the headphones to an airline is chosen, or a very small percentage- 0.18% of the Apple’s total Marketing budget based on the figures provided in 2008, which may actually increase in the end of 2010, and the percentage the proportion % of my proposed promotional strategy out of the total Apple marketing budget might be even smaller.

Times scale and External Influences

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