“We are a visual people. We learn so much by what we see. This is why advertising works.”
Millions of people are exposed to thousands of advertisements each day. Every kind of media contains one form of advertisement or another.
Advertisements are a way for corporations to get their message across of why they are better than everyone else. This fierce competition between firms follows the notion of survival of the fittest. Because of this, audience of all types are bombarded with advertisements constantly. The mantra of advertisements is that products can fill the void in one’s life. They make people think that, even though they may have good lives, they can make it better by purchasing excessive or extravagant items. The goal of an advertiser is to plant a seed in peoples’ minds. Once the seed is planted, it keeps on growing and growing until they do something about it.
A brand orientated organisation promotes its professional services, clear prices, and relevant advice. By the aid of advertising tools on mix media channels (TV, internet and radio), it targets its audience in quite impersonal way but reach many potential buyers. Although, this is an expensive approach but does have many benefits on encouraging communication effects including awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction and purchase.
Some of the tactics that an organisation uses are:
Personal Selling - Personal selling is a one to one service between the sales force and the customer; it is very interactive and can be very costly and time consuming. But it builds up relationship and results in strong customer brand loyalty.
To make this personal selling experience efficient and helpful, businesses invest large amounts of money training their staff both in personal interaction (retailing) and ensuring that they all have the required knowledge to give honest and good advice.
Sales Promotion - This part of the communication mix provides short term incentives to encourage sales. This usually increases the activation and can cause large changes in demand over short periods of time; this method usually occurs when large quantities of stock are acquired or when new product lines are coming out shortly.
Companies attempt to accommodate sales promotion by offering 30% discount for people aged 60, sale – reduced 25%, Free trial, kids go free, 30 day trial and “2 for 1” offer on designer products etc.
Direct Marketing - Direct marketing is much more personalised and usually gets more promising results. By obtaining the correct mailing list the organisation can contact the correct target audience, reducing the amount of money spend on impersonal advertisement. Especially with the home delivery service, providing customers ease. This keeps the buyers aware of new promotions or any new high technological equipment that is being introduced. Doing this shows that the company wants people to know it is doing all it can to stay the market leader.
Digital Merchandising and Branding – An organisation can build up its individual identity throughout the countries by different joint ventures with similar businesses. Also the visual image of the store or company reflects its incentive. For example, Specsavers uses a clear glass at entrance of all of its shops with their logo, in this way the firm tends to draws customers attention towards the availability of services they offer.
Furthermore digital merchandising and marketing is being used much more, especially with advances in technology and the ease of access for the public. A new digital method which has been put in place by Specsavers is a programme which allows users to digitally try on their products. In this way the business can entice customers and continue to stay the market leader in relevant sector.
Comparison to Competitors – Large scale businesses always have an economic advantage over its competitors and thus provide its products significantly cheaper than the majority of competitors keeping the quality professional service and customer satisfaction its priority. Also, by offering a variety of services the organisation can stay ahead in competition with other corporations with similar facilities. These specialities are promoted in adverting, showing the firm is leader in their relevant field with many years of experience, ensuring the service remains popular and in high demand.
Online advertisements techniques - By gathering as much personal data as possible (age, location, gender, recent searches), companies can target ads to customers with much higher response rates, the company says. Also, co-operations have established marketplaces for paid blog posts. Depending on the popularity of the blog, the firm discloses the information targeting the relevant consumers easily. Furthermore, there are software developed that can insert ads into its customers’ browsers. Simply put, no matter what the actual ads are on the page, you get an additional layer of ads that are really hard to get rid of.
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