Importance of Effective Advertising for an Organization - Coursework Example

Effective Advertising Effective advertising is that which achieves the aims of the company. That said, let us look a little closer. The aims of any advertising entity, whether a corporation or a government or even a non-profit organization is to sell their ideas. Generally this means selling a product or a service, which may or may not be a benefit to the customer. We live in an ocean of ads, totally immersed unless we travel to some wilderness area or go out to sea. Nearly everything which we pass on our way day to day, everything we see or hear, is there to sell us something. Generally it sells one of three types of goods or services: material things, services and ideas. We are using the word “advertising” to mean any means of getting attention and persuading the target audience to act upon the message. Every entity which stands to benefit from the ads is either the advertiser or the audience. The target audience is the main focus of any companys ad campaign, as these are their primary customers. In order to create an effective ad campaign, there are three requirements to be filled: 1) know your product, 2) know your customer, and 3) persuade the target audience to agree with your viewpoint and act upon your suggestions. Let us look at these one at a time before we look at the theories and practices of effective advertising. The first point seems moot for some products, ideas or services. Certainly some may seem to be deceptively simple, However, it is these which may be the most difficult to sell. Good ad people know the value of product knowledge, and they make a habit of using the product or service or living with the ideas for a while before attempting to create a good ad campaign. The simpler the product, the more difficult it is to differentiate yours from anyone else’s. One example of a product which is really difficult to differentiate is dry cell batteries, so we get the Duracell Robot and the Eveready Bunny. Marketing people and copywriters need to know everything possible about what they will be selling, including everything about the entity which produces and is currently selling it and who might use it.. If the product is something tangible, manufactured or developed then the marketer must know how it is produced, what are its parts, from what is it made and what are its functions. Then the marketer must find something which defines the product completely. Every question the target audience might ask must be answered. Knowing the target audience, the customer, is as important as knowing the product, because the two must match, or seem to, as a result of the advertising. There are even cases where the target audience is identified before the product is created. This is the case for highly disposable hygiene or cleaning products aimed at working women. Nobody needs a dust mop with a disposable paper cover, except the manufacturer and others who make money from it. However, in the case of the various Swiffer products, the target was identified, then the product was developed and they are in the process of creating the need. It targets young middle class working mothers, non-working or home working fathers and even the kids. Its utility is not emphasized. Instead they show how much fun it is. Another theory about effective advertising which has recently gained prominence is the three-fold “needs” theory: “1. the Orientation Motives (person, place, time, and circumstances) 2. the Survival Motives (spiritual, physical, sexual, and territorial) 3. the Adaptation Motive 4. the Expectation Motive 5. play. 1. The Orientation Motives: Everyone has the need to remain oriented to external reality and has a mechanism within himself/herself that keeps them oriented, much like the "compass" that keeps a migratory bird on course. There are four motivational subgroups within the Orientation Motives: • Orientation to person (OR: Person) • Orientation to place (OR: Place) • Orientation to time (OR: Time) • Orientation to circumstances (OR: Circumstances) 2. Survival Motives: The Survival Motives are the strongest of all the motives. Like the Orientation Motives, survival is "unnoticed" in the unconscious mind unless it is threatened by some external force. There are four motivational subgroups within the survival group, presented in order of importance (strongest to weakest): Spiritual survival (defined psychologically and not theologically) Physical survival Territorial survival Sexual survival 3. Adaptation Motive: There is a strong motive to adapt to ones climate, culture, group, beliefs, and surroundings. 4. The four personal Orientation Motives (person, place, time, and circumstances) as motives are unique to this book and have grown out of our research over the past 15 years. In psychiatry, these four orientations have been the cornerstone and the foundation of the mental status examination for many years. No mental status examination would ever be carried out with a patient without including and assessing these four mental states. If there is one standard in psychiatry and psychology, it is the mental status examination ( Taylor, 1988) "There is nothing the matter with advertising, Bruce Barton once protested, "that is not the matter with business in general. Since advertising is, in the end, merely a function of business management, Mr. Bartons statement is true, broadly speaking. It might be added that there is nothing the matter with business that is not the matter with the professions; also, that there is nothing the matter with business and the professions except that they are obsolete as practiced under the limiting conditions of an obsolete capitalist economy. Finally, there is nothing the matter with the machine, with industry, except that its productive forces cannot be released, and its dehumanizing effects controlled, under a profit economy.” (Rorty, 1934, p. 381) Does it not follow, then, that effective businesses do effective advertising. Of course one can also say that effective advertising helps create an effective business. So what are the components of effective advertising? It seems to have three main components: advertising exposure which matches the choice situation and induces memory in models of advertising effects. In Advertising Exposure, Memory and Choice, Kevin Keller examined the effects of advertising cues at the point of purchase on brand choice. He showed that consumers who were highly involved with the product, based purchasing decisions upon logical assessment. However, with lower involvement, they use only affective information, that is, emotional cues. Another chapter said that advertising may increase the likelihood of choice at one stage while decreasing it at another stage. This likens advertising to the model for text by Rosenblatt in her timeless book, The Reader, the Text and the Poem, in that there is attention for information and attention for enjoyment, where reading a phone book or a cookbook for information would be “efferent “ reading and reading for enjoyment would be “aesthetic”. The same holds true for how we pay attention to advertising: we give our attention to acquire information or just to enjoy the ad. (Rosenblatt, Louise M.1978) According to Herr and Fazio, attitudes can predict behavior well when they are highly accessible, which is in contrast with Fishbeins attitude theory. The book covers attitudes and even when consumers are most likely to form differences of opinion. Of course, exposure to advertising in any given media will be affected by a previous advertising exposure in any other media. (Do I see Rosenblatt here too?) Isen shows how a positive affective state “during exposure to advertising may influence how consumers categorize and think about the advertised product and how they relate it to other products or services.” She then considers how advertising exposure may influence what information is learned, maintained over time and drawn upon at purchase time. The writers explore the measurement of advertisement effectiveness. Deighton and Hoch review the differences between informational and drama advertisements and the advantages and disadvantages of each. They then discuss the elements that are required for effective drama advertising and how to assess whether these elements exist in a particular drama advertisement. Gengles and Reynolds present a methodology for estimating a hierarchical means-end analysis for gauging the effectiveness of television commercials. Rothschild discusses the use of EEG as diagnostic measures of advertising effectiveness from a series of studies that examine the relationship between different physical elements of television commercials and EEG measures. ( Andrew A. Mitchell 1993) One must understand three technical terms for advertising in order to completely understand most literature written about advertising theory. The first is ad execution, when essential messages are about the same, and the characters, dialog or general scene may change for each case. “Each variation is referred to as an ad execution. Also, showing different pieces of the same ad at different times creates different executions, the way that a particular ad is carried out or executed. How often an ad appears is called its flighting. Some advertisers schedule their brands advertising to appear every week. This is known as a continuous advertising schedule. Others prefer to flight their advertising, in other words to have a burst of several weeks of the same advertising followed by a few weeks off air, then go on air again with another few weeks of the same advertising and so on. This is known as a flighted ad schedule. Each new burst of advertising is regarded as a separate flight. “( Andrew A. Mitchell - editor 1993) The third technical term is TRP which is short for Target Rating Points. This is known by different names in different countries. These are closely related to the rating of the media where the ad appears, especially tied to television ratings. So let us look at what works in advertising and what does not work. Looking at advertising through a research based environment has led to several conclusions: “1. Advertising works on people just like you and me--not just on those other more gullible people out there. 2. The typical world of advertising that we may have envisaged where advertisers always knew exactly what their advertising was doing turned out to be very far from the truth. 3. The reality is that there are more ads that fail than ads that are outstandingly successful. The great majority of ads are at best mediocre in their effect. 4. The fourth realization was that much of the myth and mystique of advertising has come from the tribal agencies--many of which know less than they would like us to think about how or why advertising works. As with medicine men, their powers and methods have seemed all the greater because of the mystery that surrounds them. By imputing witchdoctor-lake powers to advertising agencies, books like The Hidden Persuaders and Subliminal Seduction helped to enshrine and perpetuate this mythology. 5. The fifth realization is that persuasion per se is a mechanism that is rarely involved in advertising. If it were, this book might have been called The Not-So-Hidden Persuaders. 6. Finally the real mechanisms underlying advertising effects turn out to be more subtle than they are mystical. “(Sutherland, Max and Sylvester, Alice K. 2000) So how does one go about creating effective advertising? Essentially, a good ad copywriter needs much the same talent as a poet, though to a lesser degree, and the ad writer only needs to know what and a little of why, with very little understanding of anything else or how it all relates to the rest of the world. However, really effective advertising touches us on a deeper level as does poetry. It makes use of images and the meaning and feelings we attach to them. It is interesting to note that with mature products, using words with ethnic clues and connotations actually stimulates the market. (Bush, Alan 1993 ) David Lindo reduces effective advertising to using a system of “ahas”, “oh-ohs” and “ghosts”. The first two are pretty easy to guess. An “aha” is something really good about the product, service or idea, or even the company that you can wave a flag about. The second one is something that needs improvement.. The something bad need not even be mentioned, as long as your ads stress the positive opposite. However, it has been found to be very effective to mention your shortcomings and show how you are fixing them, compensating or turning them into positives. The last one, “ghosts”, is an interesting phenomenon. It works by inference. You simply say something challenging about your competitor which can raise suspicion in the customers mind. “Does your bank add tiny charges identified with labels you do not understand? Are you paying hidden extra charges?” This would be enough for the reader to begin to wonder, at the very least. If they do not check, the impression actually gets stronger that they are paying too much. Another recent difference is in the area of B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Customer) advertising. Until the advent of the Internet, all B2B advertising was done by virtue of company magazines and newsletters which were sent to customers. Now, we can target different email and e-newsletters at businesses than those we would send to end-user customers. In addition, web sites can be arranged so businesses have access to the business side and customers do not. So how does the advertising differ? Well, the form is very different. The use of color and artistic format is still used, since it costs little or nothing. However, the content is very different, appealing to logic, rather than emotions. For businesses it is important to stress the ROI ( Return on Investment) of the products or services. End-user customer only need to know how it will benefit them in some tangible way. B2B advertising is likely to center on what customers think of the product, its popularity and shelf life. It is also likely that supply chain and packaging will be emphasized, something the customer cares little about. In addition, the provider may offer support, but it will take a different form, and if they provide turnkey solutions or automatic RMA generation and return labels this will be shown, and would be meaningless to most end-users. In essence, B2B advertising deals with the bottom line, i.e. Profitability, supplier reliability and quality which prevents returns. End user, B2C advertising, on the other hand, appeals to the customers right brain activity, emotional reaction being very important for branding memory. “Internet advertising differs from traditional media advertising in many ways. Among the most salient characteristics are: (1) unlimited delivery of information beyond time and space, (2) unlimited amounts and sources of information, and (3) the ability to target specific groups or individuals. However, probably one of the most significant differences may be the interactivity of internet advertisements. What this interactivity implies for the media audience is that it confers them with the ability to "choose and respond" to a particular advertisement of their liking. This is especially important in light of the current shift in advertising strategy that favors the effectiveness of deriving maximum response from selected target groups over the efficiency of providing maximum exposure to many unknown audience groups with a minimum cost. “ (Yoon & Kim, 2001) Advertising is becoming a field of dreams. If you can dream it, they will buy. However, the application of those dreams must be grounded in solid psychological theory and then applied with considerable artistic finesse. It may be enough for B2B advertising to make plenty of information available in an easy to find and read format which shows how the product will raise the bottom line. However, the public expects to be informed and entertained to boot, so Shakespeare is welcome here, in his modern dress please., Sources Cited Alan Bush; Business Perspectives, Vol. 6, Spring 1993 Fulton, Richard L. Maddock, Richard C. Marketing to the Mind: Right Brain Strategies for Advertising and Marketing.Quorum Books, 1996 Lindo, David K,. 1998.Ahas, Oh-Ohs And Ghosts: Creating Effective Advertising . Doors and Hardwware Mitchell, Andrew A - editor. Advertising Exposure, Memory and Choice. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Hillsdale, NJ. Publication Year: 1993. Page N 4. Rorty, James. Our Masters Voice: Advertising. Contributors: - John Day.. New York. 1934. Rosenblatt, Louise M.. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978. Sutherland, Max and Sylvester, Alice K. 2000.Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer: What Works, What Doesnt, and Why. Contributors: Max Sutherland - author, Alice K. Sylvester - author. Publisher: Allen & Unwin. Place of Publication: St. Leonards, N.S.W.. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 141. Read More