MK7040 Marketing in a Digital Age and Corporate Social Responsibility: Assignment Solution

ROYAL DOCKS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND LAW

Provisional 

Module Title:  Marketing in a Digital Age and Corporate Social Responsibility

Module Code: MK7040

Level 7 

Term 2

Academic Year 2019/20

ASSESSMENT

This assessment is an individual project that contains one individual summative report and one formative group presentation. 

• Formative group presentation (0% - verbal feedback is provided).   
• Summative individual written report (100%). 

Emerging new technologies are changing the way consumers interact with brands which in turn provide avenues for marketers to reach their target consumer across a myriad of digital channels. In the connected world, we live in, successful marketing will require connected, personalised and real-time customer experience. Companies are experimenting on different marketing communication strategies, and embracing customers using various touchpoints to position their brands and connect with their target market. However, the hunger to buyers and consumers data and the eagerness to influence their decisions and behaviours led unconventional users of marketing and communications techniques to go above and beyond the norm. Such practices led to controversy in the society regarding privacy, ethically and legally accepted the use of data.

One of the major cases in recent years is the role Cambridge Analytica played in the latest American presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the UK. Political marketing and the use of digital media in political campaigns is not new; however, the way Cambridge Analytica used Facebook users’ data to target users with influential contents that can lead to favourable results to the promoted parties was labelled unethical and illegal.  

Your Task

Research the case of Cambridge Analytica and write a report that reflects on and answers the following questions. 

Your answers should be supported by evidence from the data you collect through your research. Your answers should also show how you analysed the data you collected using the marketing theories and concepts, and corporate social responsibility concepts you are learning in this module.

The questions:

1. What was the business opportunity for Cambridge Analytica? How did the company capture it? 
2. Stand in the shoes of CEO Alex Nix: What could have been done better BEFORE the scandal in 2017 and earlier? What could have been done better AFTER the scandal broke (early 2018)? (Consider the following areas: marketing communication strategy and message, corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation, the impact on brand awareness and brand trust)
3. How do you judge the value of data for influencing decision making, in business as well as in politics? (consider the corporate social responsibility, impact on society, ethics and legislations)
4. Explain the work and service Cambridge Analytica provided Trump’s campaign. Apart from the legal side, in your perspective, was it right for Cambridge Analytica to provide this work for Trump?
5. How do public goodwill/license to operate and data-driven technology companies interrelate? 
6. Facebook continues to face major ethical and legal challenges. What challenges Facebook brand is facing today? And what implications these challenges and the case of Cambridge Analytica have for the future of Facebook from your perspective?

Write a 3000-words report (10±) answering the above questions. Build clear arguments in your answers. Strengthen these arguments with sufficient evidence from the case study, your research into the market and the company and from the marketing and corporate social responsibility literature as appropriate.