Discussion On Company’s Guidance Of Public Opinion Of Controversial Advertising

Network is one of the most prominent new media in nowadays communication.There appears many new features and changes in the communication process along withthe rapid development of cybermedia. The discourse advantage, monopoly position andone-way mode communication of traditional mass media have been gradually eliminated.Two-way or even multi-direction communication pattern has been formed. The boundarybetween advertisement and advertising audiences become less obvious. Traditionaladvertising communication model has been challenged a lot, since advertising is nolonger a one-way ‘instilling’ from the advertiser to the audience. The audience can havefeed back immediately toward the advertisement and express their own ideas andopinions. Some companies are still accustomed to the one-way mode of thinking oftraditional mass media, and unaware of communicating and interacting with audience.They can not take the content and forms of advertisement into consideration from theaudience’s point of view, which may cause the resentment of audience and make theadvertisement quite controversial. Such negative public opinions would have a seriousimpact on the company and on the brand image.In order to reduce the loss and to restore the reputation, companies shouldeffectively guide and transform such negative opinions. However, there exists a lotproblems and shortcomings on the guidance of negative public opinion of controversialadvertising.The paper consists of four chapters: introduction, company’s guidance of publicopinion of controversial advertising, the reason of controversial public opinion caused byadvertising and the techniques of guidance. In the introduction part, we mainly presentthe research background, literature review, and research method as well as conceptdefinition. While we define the concepts, we discuss and analyze the concept ofcontroversial advertising, and the relationship between controversial advertising andpublic opinion. Chapter1describes the current situation of domestic enterprises’ publicopinion guidance to controversial advertisement. We elaborate the importance ofcompany’s guidance toward public opinion. Based on the analysis of two cases, we havean conclusion that there are two problems that our domestic company should solve when they attempt to guide public opinion: retarded response and deficiency in guidance. InChapter2, we analyze the reason of controversial public opinion which caused byadvertising from the following three aspects: the content and forms of advertising, thedifferences on the psychological needs and the comprehensive ability of the audience,and the new channel provided by network media where people can express their ownviews. Chapter3discusses how should our enterprises deal with and guide the negativeopinions caused by controversial advertising, then summarizes the steps to the guidanceof public opinion. As for the methods of guidance, we suggest to adopt different meanstoward different public opinion forms. In the actual guidance process, we usecommunication theories such as agenda setting and spiral of silence as a support.Through the analysis and discussion, the paper aims at giving some inspirations andguidance to enterprises when they are dealing with such adverse situations, and the socialvalue of this paper can also be reflected in this way.