Advertising
Kotler and Armstrong define advertising as “any pay
form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by
an identified sponsor” (p. 434). As the definition suggests, advertising can be used by any firm, institution, professional, or agency that has the objective of promote, persuade, educate, the intended audience about the values, and benefits they are offering. For example, the U.S. government can use advertising to motivate people to participate in a Census; in the same way, Apple uses advertising to communicate the value of its products to target customers.
The following illustration walks us through the four main decision, marketers must take into account while developing the advertising strategy:
The following illustration walks us through the four main decision, marketers must take into account while developing the advertising strategy:
Copyright ©2014 by
Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved
The objective setting main goal is to define the job of advertising during the whole marketing program. I have learned from the marketing 306 class, that the best option for a company is to build customer relationships, then, the main objective of advertising should be to communicate customers the value added they acquired when purchasing its products. According to the text book Principles of Marketing written by Kotler and Armstrong, the advertising objectives can be classified in three categories, Informative advertisement, Persuasive Advertisement, and Reminder Advertisement (p. 435).
Informative advertising is commonly used when introducing a new-product category, specially, if the product is highly technical and require extra explanation about the key benefits to make the sale. For example, LG uses informative advertisement to teach buyers about the new uses of the product, "The LG G Pad 7.0 LTE is the
perfect companion to your existing smartphone, providing a vivid 7" HD+ IPS
screen and a quad-core processor. Enjoy your favorite apps, movies, games, and
more on the go with this compact, connected tablet" ( at&t website). Persuasive advertising "becomes more important as competition increases" (Kotler and Armstrong, p. 435). The main goal here is to increase customers' demand by underlining that the company's products are better than the competition. For example, as a response of a potential increase on demand of the LG tablet, Apple's new advertising strategy would be to suggest consumers that the Apple iPad Air 2 - 16GB have the capability of taking larger panorama pictures than any other device in the market, also, they can underline that the iPad Air 2 have more power and battery life than its similar LG tablet. Reminder Advertising is commonly used by mature products to keep customer relationships, and to keep the product in the mind of target costumers. For example, Coca-Cola is a mature product that does not miss the opportunity of keeping its customers inform or persuade them to buy the product at all times.
The advertising budget includes “the dollars and other resources
allocated to a product or a company advertising program” (Kotler and Armstrong,
p. 437). After setting the advertising objectives, companies have to start
analyzing the amount of money they will spend to communicate the values of the
products they are offering in the market. Usually, this product’s advertising
budget is tied to its stage in the product life cycle. For example, in the
previous example LG learned that they needed to persuade customers about the new
features of its Tablet (advertising objectives), now, they have to establish
the budget that will cover the cost of the advertising campaign, since, the
product is new in the market they have to invest higher amounts of money, and probably
more time advertising it. Additionally, LG has to consider the level of market
share they expect to achieve, and current competition offering similar brands in
the market.
According to Kotler
and Armstrong, companies that are working on the advertising strategy must decide about the type of messages,
and the media that will deliver it to target consumers (p. 437). We learned
that having a good budget would benefit the company, but the budget alone will
not guarantee success if the message delivered is not effective. Therefore, creating
a good message is everyday more important for a company, specially, in these
days that customers have the ability, and the access to the necessary
technology to break through the clutter of annoying advertisings. Additionally,
the advertising strategy must consider what type media would be more effective to
deliver the message, for example, television can reach good mass-marketing
coverage but it might work poorly on reaching selective targets; the internet
has the advantage of having high selectivity at lower cost, but with potentially
low impact since the audience can control the exposure. Other media options like
Newspapers, Direct mail, Magazines, Radio, etcetera must be analyzed by the
company, and pick one or more that effectively deliver the message to the
intended audience.
This part of the
blog, focus the attention on advertising
evaluation, or the measure of advertising effectiveness. Company’s executives
and marketers are interested in to know the return of advertising investment, which Kotler and Armstrong define
as “the net return on advertising investment divided by the cost of the
advertising investment” (p. 447). In order to know this, marketers evaluate the
communication effect and the sales and profit effects. To measures the
communication effect companies use surveys, interviews, or directly ask
customers to get their feedback about product awareness, knowledge, and
preference. This, activity can be before or after running the ad or the entire
advertising campaign. Nevertheless, sales and profits effect of advertising are
hard to measure. One common approach is to measure the sales and profit effects
based on past advertising expenses. Another way is through experiments, for
example, measuring the advertising expenditures for market areas, and its
effects in sales and profits levels, also, companies can compare results by
types of ads and media used.
Public Relations
According to Kotler and Armstrong, public relations (PR) are major
mass-promotion tools, which “include activities designed to build good
relations with the company’s various publics” (p. 450). The following are
functions that a PR department may perform:
“Press Relations or press agency: creating and placing newsworthy information in the news media to attract attention to a person, product, or service
Product Publicity: Publicizing specific products
Public Affairs: Building and maintaining national or local community relationships
Lobbying: building and maintaining relationships with legislators and government officials to influence legislation and regulation
Investor Relations: Maintaining relationships with shareholders and others in the financial community http://www.canstockphoto.com/illustration/public-relations.html
Development: Working with donors or members of nonprofit organizations to gain financial and volunteer support” (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014).
“Press Relations or press agency: creating and placing newsworthy information in the news media to attract attention to a person, product, or service
Product Publicity: Publicizing specific products
Public Affairs: Building and maintaining national or local community relationships
Lobbying: building and maintaining relationships with legislators and government officials to influence legislation and regulation
Investor Relations: Maintaining relationships with shareholders and others in the financial community http://www.canstockphoto.com/illustration/public-relations.html
Development: Working with donors or members of nonprofit organizations to gain financial and volunteer support” (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014).
Public relations
also aims to create interest in a person, product, idea, organization, or
business establishment generally through the generation and placement of
favorable stories in the news media such as newspapers, magazines, TV, radio,
and lately Web sites, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and many more internet
related social media are providing new and practical ways to reach and persuade
people.