Lopes !

Stevan Lopes
Professor Tiffany Dykstra
Communication 3170
19 November 2015

Murketing and its Manifestation in Modern Media

Entering into a modern age, where technology is abundant and public demands for

innovation and advancement is constant, products demand a new and exciting way to reach their

audience. Gone is the outdated mode of marketing, where commercials and constant exposure to

products creates a loyal fan-base for a companys products. In todays world, in order to set your

self apart and create a customer base that is willing to purchase your product, you must be much

more clever. The original concept of marketing has evolved into a new form known as

murketing to address this need for more innovative and effective advertising.

Dennis Mumby (2013) defines murketing as a marketing strategy that attempts to

integrate brands into the expression of individual identities by blurring the distinction between

marketing and everyday life and popular culture (p. 362). We simple cannot just flash a fancy

brand across a screen and describes its benefits to a target audience and expect them to purchase

our products. Murketing incorporates a large and full-fledged attack on the consumer, attempting

to integrate products into areas that were previously unexposed to marketing tactics.

Commercials and ad campaigns no longer make the cut in a world where consumers are

becoming more resistant to marketing strategies.

Instead murketing focuses on penetrating what Rob Walker (2008) calls click culture.

Consumers now hold the power to click or divert their attention to anything they choose
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thanks to advancing technology. They can fast forward through commercials, skip or block ads

on their devices, or simply upgrade to ad-free experiences. This is where murketing comes into

play. Instead of funneling millions of dollars into a concept that on longer affects their target

audience, companies are now looking to the source of their audiences identity and free time and

molding the very culture that we live in.

Companies create Youtube channels that are relevant to their target group, they create TV

and movie content that grabs their audiences attention, as well as promotes their products. They

create campaigns, that transcend the forms we are familiar with, to create live events or concerts

or anything relevant to the target group in order to grab their attention and business.

Instead of placing an ad during the commercial break of a persons favorite TV show, they

are infiltrating the actual TV show itself to place their ads, stepping into the boundary of our

everyday lives. This form of murketing, known as product placement, has always existed.

Product placement is the strategy of placing products within the frame of a TV show or movie in

order to get viewers to inadvertently purchase their products or at least relate the product to their

favorite media. However even in todays world, any attempts at product placement can be just as

transparent as a commercial or ad campaign. This is forcing companies to be even more creative

and clever in their advertising attempts. One example of this is Apple Inc.s infiltration of ABCs

hit TV show Modern Family.

Modern Family is a comedy that follows the lives of three related families; The Dunphys,

the Pritchetts, and the Tuckers, and the different struggles each of them face. The families all
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have a different dynamic and family model which leads to a lot of different adventures and

experiences that makes the show hilarious and exciting.

The specific example of murketing can be found in the episode titled Lost Connection.

(Levitan, 2015) In the episode, the mother of one of the families, Claire Dunphy, decides to call

her husband using the FaceTime function found on Apple products. The entirety of the episode is

filmed as if the audience was viewing it on the screen of Claires Macbook. Through the

remainder of the TV show the audience sees Claire and various other characters utilize functions

that are specific to Apple products, their device screens, and even the Apple logo.

This is a perfect of example of murketing. Apple infiltrated a popular TV show (so

popular that it reached over 10.9 million audience members in 2014 (Magilo, 2014)) and made

sure that their product was exposed, but in the cleverest way possible. Generally, product

placement is a fraction of a TV shows plot line. A product is usually mentioned in passing, or

placed in the shot but never given much consideration past that, but what Apple did was

revolutionary in the murketing field. They took product placement to a new level, never before

had a TV show been entirely constructed around a product before. Apple was able to effectively

infiltrate and step into the bounds of our every day lives and begin to mold popular culture,

which is the premise of the murketing theory.

The constant exposure was extremely beneficial for Apple, so much so, that they reported

a quarterly gross revenue of $58 Billion in April 2015 (Rosenstock 2015) only two months after

the episode aired, which was a huge increase compared to their second quarter from the previous

year that only generated $45.6 billion in gross revenue (Rosenstock 2015). Although there can be
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several factors that play into the corporations spike in revenue but one can argue that through

Apples genius use of murketing, they were able to increase sales by 21%. With this revolution

in murketing, companies are able to step out of the box created by traditional marketing and

advertise directly to their audience by means of their favorite TV shows, social media outlets, or

anything really.

Previously marketing filled the void for advertisers and traditional forms of getting

people to buy products, but once this method began to become ineffective, murketing tactics

such as product placement began to emerge and take its place. This leads to great murketing

triumphs like the previous examples, however this leads us to the question, What will happen

when these murketing tactics become ineffective as well? Certainly there will come a time when

Apple will no longer be able to construct entire episodes around their products without audiences

becoming aware of their ploys. What will be the next evolution of the murketing concept? I am

not a psychic nor am I a marketing guru, however I do believe that murketing is not the last form

of marketing that will be revealed within this century. As viewers and consumers become more

intelligent and aware of marketing tactics, the harder it becomes for advertisers to sell products.

This forces them to come up with creative methods of selling products, or in this case, murketing

their products to an audience. One has to speculate that audiences will sooner or later catch on to

this new form of advertising, rendering it ineffective.

There are many implications that accompany murketing and its future evolution, and they

are important to understand and analyze since this is a concept that affects everyone in all aspects

of life. However for the time being, we can marvel at the triumphs made by companies like
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Apple to successfully murket their products and revolutionize the selling process through means

of product placement in popular TV shows like Modern Family.

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References

Levitan, S. (Writer & Director), & Ganz, M. (Writer). (2015, February 25) . Lost Connection
[Television series episode]. In S. Young (Producer), Modern Family. Los Angeles, California:
American Broadcasting Company

Magilo, T. (2014, October 9). Ratings: Modern Family, Black-ish push ABC to win over CBS.
The Warp. Retrieved from https://www.thewrap.com/modern-family-blackish-abc-cbs-tv-ratings-
cw-arrow-survivor/

Mumby, D. (2013). Organizational communication: A critical approach. Thousand Oaks,

California: Sage Publications.

Rosenstock, J., Paxton, N., Hoover, J. (2015, April 27). Apple reports record second quarter
results. Retrieved from https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/04/27Apple-Reports-Record-
Second-Quarter-Results.html

Walker, R. (2008). Buying in: The secret dialogue between what we buy and who we are. New
York: Random House.