Developing An Effective Advertising Campaign

By Author: JACQUELINE SMITH
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Developing an effective advertising campaign requires a stream of interconnected decisions on such matters as budgeting and media, as well as a strong creative strategy.

Goals and objectives must be established before work on specific plans and an action is begun. This relationship between objectives and plans holds true where advertising is involved. Before developing a single advertisement, management must ask what the advertising is expected to do.

Of course, advertising is supposed to sell the product. That statement, however, is too broad to be truly useful to marketing planners. Advertising is, after all, only one element of the marketing mix. It affects and is affected by the product, the price, the packaging, the distribution, and the other elements of promotion. All these elements combine Links Of London Bracelets to sell the product; advertising does not do the job alone. Regardless of the appeal and longevity of advertising campaigns, successful advertisements do not stand by themselves. Effective advertising campaigns are developed ...
... as part of an overall marketing strategy and are tightly coordinated with the other facets of the promotional mix.

Communication Goals for Advertising
What are appropriate goals for advertising? Because advertising is a method of communication, objectives directly related to advertising should be communication goals. In general, advertisers expect to accomplish four broad communication goals: Advertisements are expected to generate attention to be understood, to be believed, and to be remembered. These goals relate to selling the product, but they are primarily matters of communication.

If these broad objectives are not considered and met, more specific objectives will not be met either. For example, if no one pays attention to an advertisement, the advertisement cannot achieve its more specific objective of, say, enhancing a romantic brand image. Likewise, an advertisement must be understood and believed if it is to reinforce or change perceptions and attitudes about a brand's characteristics. And if it is not remembered, it will have little effect on buyer behavior. With these broad objectives in mind, marketers developing advertising campaigns can set more specific objectives.

Specific Advertising Objectives
Encouraging increased consumption of a product by current users, generating more sales leads, creasing brand awareness, increasing repeat Links London purchases, and supporting the personal selling efforts are typical specific objectives for advertisements. These objectives are developed from he marketing strategy and provide the framework for creative strategy and media selection.

Many advertisements have disappeared from the media, even though "everybody them", because they did not contribute to accomplishment of specific objectives. Advertisi^ based strictly on creativity and not on a marketing objective frequently does not contribute t achievement of established goals. When a "great advertisement" does not contribute to succei in increasing market share, introducing a new product, or the like, it is only great in tta creative sense. In the business sense, it is far from great.

Opportunities in the marketplace, competitive advertising campaigns, and prior marketing strategy decisions, such as selection of a target market segment, all influence the developing] of specific advertising objectives. An important influence is the product's stage in the cycle.

Advertising Objectives and the Product Life Cycle
Advertising objectives change with environmental conditions, as do all other aspects of marketing. Marketing is dynamic; advertising, as one of its most visible components, must be especially reflective of change.

The concept of the product life cycle usefully illustrates the notion of change. Advertising objectives change over the course of a product's life. During the introductory stage of the cycle, } developing consumer brand awareness and getting customers to try the product are normal \ advertising objectives. Trade advertising to attract and interest distributors in carrying the' product is equally important, although less obvious, during this stage. Additional trade advertising may be developed later, with the objective of increasing the numbers of distributors and retail outlets.

Advertising the Mature Product
As products are managed through their product life cycles, marketing managers' advertising objectives inevitably change. Advertising for a mature brand, such as Pepsi, may be aimed at regular, brand-loyal users. Its purpose is substantially different from that of advertising used to introduce a new brand, such as Crystal Pepsi. Promotion to loyal customers requires a campaign designed to remind them of Pepsi's image and of their satisfaction with the product. Regular buyers do not need detailed information about the product and its contents.

In the case of mature products, then, advertisers give relatively little emphasis to explaining product features. Messages that are increasingly symbolic accompany the product's "aging process". Partly, this reflects that fact that Links Of London Charms mature products have found their niche in the marketplace. They have been positioned, either by marketers or by the competitive forces of the market itself, to appeal to smaller and more specialized market segments than when they were new and lacked intense competition.

Because most products on the market are in their maturity stages, much advertising emphasizes psychological benefits to differentiate brands. Such advertisements stress the reasons a brand is better than its competitors instead of emphasizing the newness or uniqueness of the generic product, as is done at the start of the product life cycle.