2011年考研英语阅读第三篇原文

2011年考研今日拉开序幕。这是2011年考研英语阅读第三篇原文，摘自《麦肯锡季刊》。考完试的大家可以看下哦，打算考研的同学也可以研究下。预祝大家考试顺利通过！

（绿字部分为考试片段）

The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media--such as television and radio commercials, print advertisements and roadside billboards--still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers enamored of a product may, for example, create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its website. In fact, the way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing's impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media.

These expanding media forms reflect dramatic changes in the way consumers perceive and absorb marketing messages. As a result, some strategic-marketing frameworks--such as the popular "paid, owned, earned" one--are in serious need of updating. Many marketers use this framework to distinguish different ways of interacting with consumers, forms of financing and measures of performance for each contact. Yet the paid, owned, earned framework increasingly looks too limited. How, for example, should a marketing strategist for a company react to requests from other companies to purchase advertising space on its product sites? How should a company deal with online activists when they take hold of a product or campaign to push a negative emotional response against it?

Two media types must therefore be added to the framework: "sold" and "hijacked." These new forms of media, which demand sustained investment and attention, challenge the traditional strategies, structure and operations of most marketing organizations. Yet marketers should view their expanding range of media options not only as a challenge but also as an opportunity worth grasping, to encourage readers to share content or even create their own.

Five Forms of Media

Too many companies view marketing plans as little more than an exercise in where and when to buy media placement. Yet as the number of digital interactions increases, marketers must recognize the power that lies beyond traditional paid media.

Paid, Owned, Earned

Paid media include traditional advertising and similar vehicles: A company pays for space or for a third party to promote its products. This market is far from dying; options for marketers are expanding exponentially with the emergence of more targeted cable TV, online-display placement and other channels, not to mention online video and search marketing, which are attracting greater interest. The second category, owned media, consists of properties or channels owned by the company that uses them for marketing purposes (such as catalogs, websites, retail stores, and alert programs that e-mail notifications of special offers).

Earned media are generated when the quality or uniqueness of a company's products and content compel consumers to promote the company at no cost to itself through external or their own "media." Starbucks ( SBUX -news - people ), for example, announced in July that its Facebook fan base exceeded 10 million people, the highest of any U.S. corporation. The company directly links its recent strong performance to its social-networking efforts and "crowdsourced" innovations such as "My Starbucks Idea," a website where anyone can suggest ways to make the company better.

Similarly, Honda ( HMC -news - people ) Japan undertook a promotion on the social-networking site Mixi where more than 630,000 people registered for information about the launch of its new CR-Z vehicle. The company automatically added "CR-Z" to these users' Mixi login names (for example, "Taro CR-Z") and gave them a chance to win a car. Nonregistered users wondered why people suddenly had login names incorporating CR-Z. Thanks to the buzz, prelaunch orders reached 4,500 units, and actual sales topped 10,000 units in the first month.

Sold

Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers touting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initial catalyst for users’ responses. But in some cases, one marketer’s owned media become another marketer’s paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies’ marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned.

Hijacked

The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. High-profile examples involve companies ranging from Nestle (whose Facebook page was hijacked) to Domino’s Pizza (a prank online video of two employees contaminating sandwiches appeared on YouTube).

In each case, passionate consumers tried to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. When that happens, the company’s response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, mitigated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.

The impact of the media revolution

The changing role of older media and the emergence of newer ones extend the marketer’s role well beyond the allocation of budgets and channels. Marketers today require a deep understanding of how consumers engage with different types of media at each stage of the journey toward a purchase decision. What’s more, these different kinds of media are related and interact with one another (Exhibit 2), so marketing plans and capabilities must adapt and evolve. Paid, owned, earned, sold, and hijacked media are evolving in four primary ways.