Advertising and Marketing

Advertising is any paid form of impersonal presentation and promotion of products, services or ideas by an individual or organization. It's one of the most important factors in accelerating the distribution of products and help to arise the standard of living.

Three main objectives of advertising are:

- to produce knowledge about the product or service;

- to create preference for it;

- to stimulate thought and action about it.

Many people make advertising such as advertisers, media, advertising agencies or supplies and special services. These people have to know as advertising art as marketing mix and market in local point. Everybody of them is met with four Ps of marketing mix: packaging, pricing, placement, promotions. Packaging means how a product will be presented. Pricing is a process of definition a price the product will be sold for. Placement suffers the channels of distribution which the product will go through when selling. At last promotions define how the product will be marketed.

All the steps of marketing deal with an advertising - immediately or via advertisers. This fact must be accounted for the promotion of any new product to the market. Firstly the product is advertised at the market by advertisements, media (for instance, TV or radio commercials), print-media, tabloid stories, outdoor signs, kinds of transportation, and points of sale, Internet advertising or other printed media. It's not necessary to use all of advertising means. But sometimes the only global attack to the customer can give the best result. In other cases it will be better to change only prestige magazine or product demonstration or another kind of advertising, the most suitable for the situation.

What advertising means have being chosen: free samples or rating cars, stands in supermarket or displays of logos in the windows of this supermarket? It is a concrete decision. But always marketing research have being delivered even it doesn't give an excellent results.

Promotion and Advertising

Promotion is aimed to increase the demand for a product. So a company should inform customers what goods and services are available, interest buyer in the products and persuade clients to buy one thing rather than something else.

One way to promote goods is to take part in a Trade Fair, where companies can exhibit samples of their products and see what response they get from prospective customers. A company representative will probably hand out brochures to advertise the product further. Customers can find the full range of goods in the company’s catalogue.

Another way of publicizing a new product is to place advertisements in magazines, newspapers, or trade journals. Circulars, leaflets, booklets, catalogues or free samples may be distributed.

A popular recent method of advertising is the issue of coupons entitling the holder to a temporary reduction in the price of a specified commodity.

In order to make the strongest possible influence on the minds of consumers a lot of companies organize advertising campaign, that is a planned set of advertising operations. The aims of an advertising campaign are:

to get attention to a product or a service;
to help customers understand a product or service;
to get customers believe in the benefits;
to establish a desire for a product;
to encourage general feelings of goodwill towards a product or a service.

Large number of consumers prefer to buy goods that are advertised.

Product advertising is an important part of the marketing mix. Its aim is to increase sales by making a product or service known to a wider audience, and by emphasising its positive qualities. A company can advertise in a variety of ways, depending on how much it wishes to spend and the size and type of audience it wishes to target. The different media for advertising include television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the Internet and direct mail. The design and organisation of advertising campaigns is usually the job of an advertising agency.

Corporate advertising is not directly concerned with increasing sales of a particular product or service, but more with the brand image, or picture, a company wants to present to the public. Public relations (PR) experts specialise in organising activities and events which generate positive publicity for companies. Unusual advertising campaigns sometimes get extra publicity for the company by way of media reports about the campaign.

As consumers get more used to advertising, companies have to come up with better ways of ensuring that people pay attention to their ads.

Innovative ways to advertise could be:

Interrupting telephone conversations with advertising messages (in exchange for free phone calls).
Talking ads at bank cash machines.
Ads on toilet walls.
Advertising on small television screen on supermarket shopping trolleys.

Coca-Cola and its advertising

John S. Pemberton invented Coca-Cola in 1886. His partner suggested an advertisement for the drink in The Atlanta Journal that very year. In 1888, Asa Chandler bought the Coca-Cola business and decided to make the product known through signs, calendars and clocks. The company began building global network when Robert Woodcruff was elected president of the company in 1923. He succeeded in transforming Coca-Cola into a truly international product by setting up a foreign department, which exported Coca-Cola to the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928. During World War Two, he promised to bring Coca-Cola to every soldier in every part of the world.

Coca-Cola's advertising has always attempted to reflect changing contemporary lifestyles. Creating an international advertising campaign requires the talents of professionals in many areas, and extensive testing and research are always done before deciding which advertisements will finally be used. Celebrity endorsements have featured heavily — Cary Grant, Ray Charles and Whitney Houston are just three of the big name stars who have agreed to appear in Coca-Cola commercials.

After launching Diet Coke in 1982, the company saw its sales grow quickly. The drink, is now the third most popular in the world. In 1985, the company tried changing the secret formula of Coca-Cola, but realised that Americans were very attached to the original recipe. The company listened to its consumers and quickly responded by returning the original formula to the market as 'Coca-Cola Classic'. Today, people in more than 160 countries around the globe enjoy drinking Coca-Cola. It is asked for more than 524 million times a day in more than 80 languages. The company intends to expand its global presence even further in the twenty-first century, particularly in developing markets.

A TV commercial generally consists of a short film sequence of between 30 and 60 seconds with an accompanying soundtrack which includes a mixture of live recordings (what people actually say in the commercial), a voice-over (the voice of someone who does not appear on screen) and music and sound effects. Various techniques are used in commercials to convince the viewer of the value of the product or service that is being advertised. One of the most common of these is 'dramatisation' where a short story is developed around the product or service. The original ideas behind a commercial of this type are developed from a scenario, a written document that summarises the action, the atmosphere, the characters and the scene where the sequences of the commercial will be filmed. An artist then produces a storyboard, or series of pictures, to show how the commercial will look.