BUSI 430 Week 8 Discussion Board Forum 4 Example

Discussion Board Forum 4: Regulation, Ethics and Evaluating IMC

BUSI 430 Promotion Strategy, Discussion Board Forum 4 Thread and Reply

Thread by [Student Name]

The forum prompt, the dental practice and the classmate are composites; the textbook and the research cited are real, and the structure follows Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 430.

Thread

The final two sections of Clow and Baack (2018) seem to cover different subjects: one explains the laws and ethical standards that govern marketing communications, the other explains how to evaluate whether an IMC program is working. I want to argue that they are two sides of the same discipline. A company that measures the real effects of its communication has less temptation to exaggerate, and a company that makes only claims it can support has nothing to fear from measurement.

The textbook explains that objective claims in advertising must be truthful and substantiated, meaning the advertiser needs a reasonable basis for a claim before making it, while obvious exaggeration that no one would take literally, known as puffery, is treated differently. The line matters in practice. "The friendliest dentist in town" is puffery; "crowns in a single visit" is a factual claim that must be true for typical patients.

Evaluation provides the discipline that keeps those claims honest. Rust et al. (2004) lay out marketing productivity as a sequence of links: actions shape customers' views and choices, those choices shape sales and share, and sales shape profit and firm value. A firm that measures each link in the chain learns what its communications actually achieve, and a firm that knows what it achieves has no need to overstate it.

Consider a dental practice advertising same-day crowns. Section 14 requires that the practice can actually deliver them, with the equipment and staffing to do so for most patients who ask. Section 15 suggests how to evaluate the campaign: not by website clicks alone, but by tracking calls and booked consultations from the ads, the share of consultations that become completed treatments and the revenue from new patients compared with the campaign's cost. If many patients call expecting a single visit and learn they need two, the measurement would expose a claim problem before it became a legal one, and the practice could revise the ad. Honest claims and good measurement reinforce each other, and both protect the practice's reputation.

Reply to Natalie

Natalie, your thread made an important point about influencer marketing: when a creator is paid to promote a product, followers deserve to know it, and the textbook's discussion of deception supports your view that hiding a paid relationship can mislead consumers (Clow & Baack, 2018). I agree completely, and I want to add a practical test that helps decide whether a disclosure is good enough.

The test is whether a reasonable follower, scrolling quickly, would understand that the post is paid. By that standard, many disclosures fail even when they are technically present. A hashtag like #sp buried among fifteen other hashtags at the end of a long caption, or a disclosure that appears only after a follower taps "more," would likely be missed. A clear statement at the start of the caption, such as "Paid partnership with the brand," or the platform's built-in paid partnership label, meets the test. For video, the disclosure should be spoken as well as written, since many viewers do not read captions.

There is also a business reason beyond compliance. Influencer marketing works because followers trust the creator, and that trust is the asset the brand is paying for. Research on influencer effectiveness finds that results depend heavily on the credibility and fit of the creator with the audience (Leung et al., 2022). A disclosure that feels hidden, when discovered, damages exactly that credibility, both for the creator and for the brand. A clear disclosure, by contrast, tends to cost little in engagement when the creator genuinely likes the product, because followers expect creators to work with brands they use.

Your example of the fitness creator who promoted a supplement without disclosing the sponsorship shows the risk well. Do you think the brand or the creator should be responsible for making sure disclosures are clear?

References

Clow, K. E., & Baack, D. (2018). Integrated advertising, promotion, and marketing communications (8th ed.). Pearson.

Leung, F. F., Gu, F. F., Li, Y., Zhang, J. Z., & Palmatier, R. W. (2022). Influencer marketing effectiveness. Journal of Marketing, 86(6), 93-115. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221102889

Rust, R. T., Ambler, T., Carpenter, G. S., Kumar, V., & Srivastava, R. K. (2004). Measuring marketing productivity: Current knowledge and future directions. Journal of Marketing, 68(4), 76-89. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.4.76.42721