Advertising Stategy Essay Example

idea which would help them fulfil their felt needs and spell out the differential benefits in a competitive situation.

On advertising also lies the onus, at least marginally, of motivating prospects to strive for creation of resources for fulfilling the new needs or to aid reallocation of available resources. Advertising is not merely directed at selling, or for that matter, at achieving the objective of gaining acceptance for a worthwhile idea or programme. It may also be an instrument for developing basic motivations for creating resources for buying goods and services or generating favourable conditions for the acceptance of an idea.

Advertising is all about from the fig leaf to furs and beyond. There can be no marketing transaction without meaningful communication. Marketing perhaps followed advertising. The drive for survival and satisfaction and the limits of human endeavour have been succinctly summed up by Maslow in his holistic-dynamic theory which brings together several schools of thought on this subject. There are five stages in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, viz. physiological, safety, belonging and love, esteem and self- actualisation.

There are two further goals to achieve, namely knowledge and beauty. The aspiration for knowledge arises from the need to know more and to develop greater understanding. The longing for beauty represents the ultimate in aesthetic satisfaction. ADVERTISING is mass media content intended to persuade audiences of readers, viewers or listeners to take action on products, services and ideas. The idea is to drive consumer behaviour in a particular way in regard to a product, service or concept.

One of the earliest attempts at formulating a definition of advertising sums it as –the

dissemination of information concerning an idea , service or product to compel action in accordance with the intent of the advertiser. The above definition could include direct personal communication with persuasive selling appeal and it was considered necessary to exclude this overlap. There is not a single generally accepted definition of advertising. Instead, there are several ways to define it. In order to comprehend advertising in its entirety , we need to look at its origin.

The word ‘advertising’ is derived from its Latin root ad verter , which means ‘to turn towards’ or to ‘to attract attention to’. In this broad sense, it comprises all acts that are directed towards drawing attention. These could include a publicity stunt for the product , an event geared towards product promotion, a press note applauding the brand , a coupon doled out with a complementary product, a mail sent out detailing product features and the like. But then , such an extensive definition of advertising would include almost every promotional act of an organisation , making the analysis and measurement of advertising difficult.

Hence we need to agree on a more specific definition of advertising that connotes its characteristics and helps differentiate it from other forms of communication. The Definitions Committee of the American Marketing Association, therefore, defined advertising as ‘the paid, impersonal, one-way marketing of persuasive information from an identified sponsor disseminated through channels of mass communication to promote the adoption of goods, services or ideas’. Any mass medium can deliver advertising. Some random examples: newspapers, agazines, radio and television broadcasts, films, stage shows, websites, billboards, posters, wall paintings, town criers, human billboards, flyers,

rack cards, the back of event tickets, elastic bands on disposable diapers, bathroom stall doors, cars, taxicabs, buses, trains, subway platforms, bus stop benches, street furniture, airplanes, in-flight seat-back trays, overhead bins, passenger screens, skywriting, shopping carts, stickers on fruit in supermarkets, supermarket receipts, coffee cups, mobile phone screens, opening billboards in streaming audio and video.

The above definition highlights the following characteristics of advertising- •The fact that it is ‘a paid form’ of presentation emphasises that advertising space or time must be purchased •Its ‘non personal’ nature emphasises the fact that it is not a direct or personalised presentation to one individual but to the masses •‘ Presentation’ signifies the format in which advertisements communicate •‘Promotion’ indicates the objective of advertising and •‘Identified sponsor’ refers to the identification of the brand or the advertiser that is communicating Today advertising has become an integral part of our social and economic structures.

An increasing number of companies are spending millions of dollars on advertising in India every year. It becomes important to differentiate between advertising and publicity or what is more commonly known as public relations among managers. The advertiser has full control of the message all the way to the audience while the public relations professional has control only until the message is released to media gatekeepers who make decisions about whether to pass it on to the audience and in what form.

Feature, articles and write-ups on products and processes and companies and organisations initiated by the media have become popular owing to the continued expansion of media and increasing journalistic interest in business and industrial activity. These also serve the

purpose of disseminating information about a company and its products / services and may represent them in a favourable light. This amounts to unpaid publicity over which the concerned company or organisation would have no explicit control and should be excluded from advertising.

Marketing is more than just distributing goods from the manufacturer to the final consumer. It comprises all the stages between creation of the product and after-market which follows the eventual sale. One of these stages is advertising. The stages are links in a chain and the chain will break if one of the links is weak. Advertising is therefore as important as every other stage or link, and each depends on the other for success. The product or service itself , its naming, packaging, pricing and distribution are all reflected in advertising , which has been called the lifeblood of an organisation.

Without advertising the products or services cannot flow to the distributors or sellers and on to the consumers or users. A successful national economy depends on advertising promoting sales so that factory production is maintained, people are employed and have spending power and the money goes round and round. When this process stops there is a recession. Similarly, prosperous countries are those in which advertising does its job. In the third world countries and in Russia, economies are poor and advertising is minimal, especially when a large proportion of the population are young non- earners. History of advertising

Advertising belongs to the modern industrial world, and to those countries which are developing and becoming industrialised. In the past when a shopkeeper or stall-holder had only to show

and shout his goods to passersby, advertising as we know today hardly existed. Advertising can be traced to the very beginnings of recorded history. Archaeologists working in the countries around the Mediterranean Sea have dug up signs announcing various events and offers. The Romans painted walls to announce gladiator fights, and the Phaenicians painted pictures promoting their wares on large rocks along parade routes. uring the golden age in Greece, town criers announced the sale of cattle, crafted items, and even cosmetics. Down the line the early forms of advertising were signs such as the inn sign, the red-and-white striped barber’s pole, the apothecary’s jar or coloured liquid and the wheelwright’s wheel, some of which have survived until today. Effect of urban growth The need for advertising developed with the expansion of population and the growth of towns with their shops and large stores; mass production in factories; roads and railways to convey goods; and popular newspapers in which to advertise.

The large quantities of goods being produced were made known by means of advertising to unknown customers who lived far from the place of manufacture. This process developed some two hundred years ago in industrialised countries. Advertising grew with the development of media, such as the coffee-house newspapers of the seventeenth century, and the arrival of advertising agencies such as White’s in 1800 to handle British government lottery advertising. Advertising and the modern world Advertising is part of the cultural and economic fabric of the society. It grows in concert with a dynamic and advanced economy.

If one looks at the old pictures of horse buses in, say, late 19th century London

one will see that they carry advertisements for products famous today, a proof of the effectiveness of advertising. 19th century advertisers still with us today include Beecham, Cadbury, Lever Brothers and Lipton. Modern advertising however is a far cry from these early efforts. U. S. advertisers now run up an estimated annual advertising bill of more than $290 billion; worldwide ad spending exceeds an estimated $604 billion. Proctor & Gamble , the world’s largest advertiser ,last year sent $5. billion on U. S. advertising and $8. 5 billion worldwide, followed by Unilever, with an ad spend of $4. 5 billion. Although advertising is used mostly by business firms, a wide range of not-for-profit organisations, professionals and social agencies also use advertising to promote their causes to various target publics. Thus the modern world depends on advertising. Without it, producers and distributors would be unable to sell, buyers would not know about and continue to remember products and services, and the modern industrial world would collapse.

If factory output is to be maintained profitably, advertising must be powerful and continuous. Mass production requires mass consumption which in turn requires advertising to the mass market through the mass media. The history of advertising can only be studied from the perspective of a country’s political, economic, and cultural environment. Because modern advertising has its roots in the United States one can trace the relationship between advertising and the circumstances that made it possible such as development of mass media, a rising middle class, effective transportation, and the growth of mass production in this country.

Few if any historians today would claim that they could compose a

complete history of an era from its advertisements, but in recent years scholars have creatively probed advertisements for clues about the society and the business environment that produced them. The presence of many excellent online collections of advertisements provides learners as well as established scholars the opportunity to examine these sources in new ways. The experience can be tantalizing and frustrating, since advertisements don’t readily proclaim their intent or display the social and cultural context of their creation.

Yet studying advertisements as historical sources can also be fascinating and revealing. Most of us—avid consumers though we may be—pride ourselves on being able to “see through” advertisements. We can interpret this phrase in several ways. Most simply, we “see through” ads when we are oblivious to them—when we look right past them, as we do with most ads we encounter daily. Much of what advertising professionals do is aimed at “cutting through the clutter,” overcoming our propensity to ignore most ads.

In another sense of “seeing through,” we dismiss ads because we judge them to be misleading or dishonest. As historians, however, we need to focus on ads and see or hear them. As Yogi Berra put it, “You can observe a lot by watching. ” Modern advertising began in the United States in the late 1800s and, during the century that followed, advertising practitioners introduced sophisticated elements such as motivational research to define consumer behaviour , media analysis to reach targeted consumers, and creative strategy to enhance selling messages.

At the outset it is necessary to understand that advertising is a communications tool that requires two primary components: 1. Centralised exchange- when

goods and services moved from a system of decentralised exchange in which buyers and sellers dealt directly with each other one to one in which merchants functioned as intermediaries, advertising was needed to make potential consumers aware of the availability of goods.

2. An economy in which supply surpasses demand- when products are scarce and demand is high, advertising’s role is largely limited to letting buyers know the location and the price of goods. However, as mass production creates an overabundance of products and competing brands, advertising must not only inform and persuade potential customers that these products exist but also give consumers reasons to purchase one brand or product category over those of competitors. Beginnings The urge to advertise seems to be a part of human nature, evidenced since ancient times.

Of the 5000 year recorded history of advertising right up to our present television satellite age, the part that is most significant begins when the United States emerged as a great manufacturing nation about 100 years ago. The discussion of the foundations of modern advertising can be divided into four broad periods: I. The premarketing era. From the start of product exchange in prehistoric times to the middle of the seventeenth century, buyers and sellers communicated in very primitive ways.

For most of this period media such as clay tablets, town criers, and tavern signs were the best ways to reach potential prospects for a product or service. Only in the latter decades of the period did primitive printing appear as the forerunner of modern mass media. II. The mass communication era. From the 1700s to the early decades of the

1900s, advertisers were increasingly able to reach larger and larger segments of the population. Mass newspapers first appeared in the 1830s , quickly followed by a number of national magazines.

By the 1920s, radio had ushered in the broadcast era when advertising was delivered free to virtually every American household. III. The research era. During the last 50 years, advertisers have used ever more sophisticated techniques for identifying and reaching narrowly targeted audiences with messages prepared specifically for each group or individual( in the case of direct mail). Early research was based on general information about the age, sex, and geographic location of consumers. Today, advertising research deals with much more detailed information about the lifestyles and motivations of consumers.

Rather than who we are, advertising research is studying the motivations behind our purchase behaviour. IV. The interactive era. A fourth era, which we are just embarking on, is one of interactive communication. As advertisers begin to understand their customers on a one-to-one basis, they are starting to use this information to reach buyers with customized information. Soon consumers will use communication on an interactive basis. Rather than mass media sending one-way messages to the audience, the audience will control when and where they will give permission for the media to reach them.