Each week, you’ll be participating in a threaded discussion relative to chapter topics. They involve the whole class and deal with questions that come up in your chapter readings. You are required to post twice weekly in each unit discussion. In many cases, I will have multiple topics within each chapter discussion. You are not required to post on each topic to receive credit; you are required to respond and/or comment to one or more of the topics twice. Remember, it is a discussion so you should be responding to each other unless, of course, you begin the discussion on a specific topic. Short responses such as “I agree with John” will not count; nor will short one or two sentence responses. Also, if your response/comment is not original in thinking, you will not receive full credit. In other words, be sure to read other comments before you make your own or you could duplicate someone else’s response therefore reducing the point value for your thread. Those who wait until late Sunday may have a more difficult time with this.

Chapter 4 is a long one covering many aspects of a company’s identity, image, reputation, and corporate advertising. We will tackle a few of these in our discussion topics. Pick those topics you have the most interest in.

Topic 1: Using an example of Corporate Advertising, share whether or not you feel the company’s strategy is clear and aligns with what the company says it is (may need to look at the company’s website to determine), if it can be easily categorized (see the three categories in your text), and whether the design and copy in the advertising work together to form an effective message.

Topic 2: List three or four companies or products within an industry (for example, Cadillac, Mercedes Benz, Lexus, Lincoln, and Infiniti) and describe differences among the companies or products which are positioned similarly. In the example, these are all luxury autos, but the Lincoln and Cadillac have a totally different cachet from Mercedes Benz and Lexus. What goes into creating those impressions?