CHAPTER 19
Advertising and Public Relations
Lecture Outline
(Transparency Figure 19A: Chapter Outline)
I. The Nature and Types of Advertising
A. Advertising is a paid form of nonpersonal communication transmitted through mass media, such as television, radio, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, mass transit vehicles, and outdoor displays. Advertising is used to promote goods, services, ideas, images, issues, people, and anything else advertisers want to publicize or foster.
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B. Institutional Advertising
1. Institutional advertising promotes organizational images, ideas, political issues, or socially approved behavior.
2. Advocacy advertising, a type of institutional advertising, promotes a company’s position on a public issue.
C. Product Advertising
1. Product advertising promotes the uses, features, and benefits of products.
2. The two types of product advertising are pioneer advertising and competitive advertising.
a) Pioneer advertising focuses on stimulating demand for a product category (rather than a specific brand) by informing potential customers about the product’s features, uses, and benefits, and is employed when the product is in its introductory stage.
b) Competitive advertising attempts to stimulate demand for a specific brand by indicating a brand’s features, uses, and advantages, sometimes through indirect or direct comparisons with competing brands.
(1) Comparative advertising compares two or more brands on the basis of one or more product characteristics.
(2) Reminder advertising tells customers that an established brand is still around and reminds consumers about the brand’s uses, characteristics, and benefits.
(3) Reinforcement advertising assures current users they have made the right brand choice and tells them how to get the most satisfaction from it.
II. Developing an Advertising Campaign
Several steps are required to develop an advertising campaign, which is the creation and execution of a series of advertisements to communicate with a particular target audience. The number of steps and the exact order in which they are carried out can vary according to the organization’s resources, the nature of its products, and the types of audiences to be reached.
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A. Identifying and Analyzing the Target Audience
1. The target audience is the group of people toward whom advertisements are aimed. A target audience may include everyone in the firm’s target market, but at times, marketers may wish to direct a campaign at only a portion of the target market.
2. Advertisers research and analyze target audiences to establish an information base for a campaign. Information commonly needed includes location and geographic distribution of the target group; the distribution of age, income, race, sex, and education; and consumer attitudes regarding the purchase and use of both the advertiser’s products and competing products.
3. Generally, the more advertisers know about the target audience, the better able they are to develop an effective advertising campaign.
B. Defining the Advertising Objectives
1. Advertisers should consider what the firm hopes to accomplish with the campaign. To develop a campaign with direction and purpose, they must define their advertising objectives.
2. Because advertising objectives guide campaign development, advertisers should define them carefully to ensure that the campaign will accomplish what they desire.
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3. Advertising objectives should be stated in clear, precise, and measurable terms.
a) Precision and measurability allow advertisers to evaluate advertising success at the campaign’s end in terms of whether or not the objectives have been met.
(1) To provide precision and measurability, advertising objectives should contain benchmarks and indicate how far an advertiser wishes to move from the benchmark.
(2) An advertising objective should specify a time frame so that advertisers know exactly how long they have to accomplish the objective.
b) Advertising objectives usually are stated in terms of either sales or communication.
(1) When an advertiser defines objectives in terms of sales, the objectives focus on increasing absolute dollar sales, increasing sales by a certain percentage, or increasing the firm’s market share.
(2) When objectives are stated in terms of communication, they are designed to increase brand or product aware-ness, make consumers’ attitudes more favorable, or increase consumers’ knowledge of a product’s features.
C. Creating the Advertising Platform
1. An advertising platform consists of issues or selling points an advertiser wishes to include in the advertising campaign.
2. A marketer’s advertising platform should consist of issues that are important to consumers.
a) One of the best ways to determine what those issues are is to survey consumers about what they consider most important in the selection and use of the product involved.
b) Research is the most effective method for determining the issues of an advertising platform, but it is expensive. As a result, the most common way to develop a platform is to base it on the opinions of personnel within the firm and individuals in the advertising agency if an agency is used.
3. Because the advertising platform is a base on which to build the message, marketers should analyze this stage carefully in developing an advertising campaign. If the advertisements communicate information that consumers do not consider important when they select and use the product, the campaign can fail.
D. Determining the Advertising Appropriation
1. The advertising appropriation is the total amount of money a marketer allocates for advertising for a specific time period.
2. Many factors affect the amount of the advertising appropriation, including size of geographic market, distribution of buyers within the market, type of product advertised, and the firm’s sales volume relative to competitors’.
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3. Various techniques are used to determine the advertising appropriation.
a) In the objective-and-task approach, marketers initially determine the objectives that a campaign is to achieve and then attempt to list the tasks required to accomplish them. Once the tasks have been determined, their costs are added to ascertain the appropriation needed to accomplish the objectives.
b) In the percent-of-sales approach, marketers multiply a firm’s past sales, plus a factor for planned sales growth or decline, by a standard percentage based on what the firm traditionally spends on advertising and what the industry averages.
c) In the competition-matching approach, marketers try to match their major competitors’ appropriations in terms of absolute dollars or to allocate the same percentage of sales for advertising that competitors allocate.
d) In the arbitrary approach, a high-level executive in the firm states how much can be spent on advertising for a certain time period.
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E. Developing the Media Plan
1. To derive the maximum results from media expenditures, a marketer must develop an effective media plan. A media plan sets forth the exact media vehicles to be used and the dates and times the advertisements will appear.
2. The media planner’s primary goal is to reach the largest number of persons in the advertising target per dollar spent on media.
a) Reach—the percentage of consumers in the target audience actually exposed to a particular advertisement in a stated period of time
b) Frequency—the number of times these targeted consumers are exposed to the advertisements
3. When selecting media, the planner must first decide which kinds of media to use: radio, television, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, outdoor displays, mass transit vehicles, or some combination of these.
4. Media planners must consider many factors when formulating the media plan.
a) They should analyze the location and demographic characteristics of people in the target audience because people’s taste in media differ according to demographic groups and locations.
b) They should consider the sizes and types of audiences specific media reach.
(Building Customer Relationships: Remodeling Advertising Messages)
5. The message content sometimes affects the types of media used.
a) Print media can be used more effectively than broadcast media to present many issues or numerous details.
b) When colors, patterns, and textures are important, media that can yield high-quality reproduction, such as magazines or television, should be used.
6. The cost of media is an important but troublesome consideration.
Media planners should try to obtain the best coverage possible for each dollar spent. A cost comparison indicator lets an advertiser compare the costs of several vehicles within a specific medium relative to the number of persons reached by each vehicle.7. There are three general types of media schedules.
a) Continuous—advertising runs at a constant level with little variation.
b) Flighting—advertisements run for set periods of time, alternating with periods in which no ads run.
c) Pulsing—a combination of continuous and flighting.
F. Creating the Advertising Message
1. The basic content and form of an advertising message are a function of several factors.
a) A product’s features, uses, and benefits affect the content of the message.
b) Characteristics of people in the target audience, including gender, age, education, race, income, occupation, lifestyle, and other attributes, influence both the content and the form.
c) An advertising campaign’s objectives and platform also affect the content and form of its messages.
(1) If a firm’s advertising objectives involve large sales increases, the message may have to be stated in hard-hitting, high-impact language and symbols; when campaign objectives aim at increasing brand aware-ness, the message may use repetition of the brand name and words and illustrations associated with it.
(2) The platform is the foundation on which campaign messages are built.
d) Choice of media obviously influences the content and form of the message.
(1) Effective outdoor displays and short broadcast spot announcements require concise, simple messages.
(2) Magazine and newspaper advertisements can include numerous details and long explanations.
(3) Some magazine publishers print regional issues, in which advertisements and editorials are different in different geographic regions. A precise message content can be tailored to a particular geographic section of the advertising target.
(Transparency Figure 19.2)
2. Messages for most advertisements depend on the use of copy and artwork.
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a) Copy
Copy is the verbal portion of the advertisement and may include headlines, subheadlines, body copy, and signature. Not all advertising copy contains all of these copy elements.
(1) The headline is critical because it is often the only part of the copy that people read. It should attract readers’ attention and create enough interest to make them want to read the body copy.
(2) The subheadline links the headline to body copy and sometimes helps explain the headline.
(3) Body copy consists of an introductory statement or paragraph, several explanatory paragraphs, and a closing paragraph.
(4) The signature contains the firm’s trademark, logo, name, and address, identifying the sponsor. It should be attractive, legible, distinctive, and easy to identify in a variety of sizes.
(5) Radio copy should be informal and conversational and consist of short, familiar terms, to attract listeners’ attention and result in greater impact.
(6) Television copy should neither overpower nor be overpowered by the visual material.
(7) A storyboard is a mockup combining copy and visual material to show the sequence of major scenes in the commercial.
b) Artwork
Artwork consists of an advertisement’s illustration and layout.
(1) Illustrations are often photographs, but they can also be presented as drawings, graphs, charts, and tables. They are used to attract attention, encourage the audience to read or listen to the copy, communicate an idea quickly, or communicate an idea that is difficult to put into words.
(Transparency Figure 19G)
(2) The layout is the physical arrangement of the illustration, headline, subheadline, body copy, and signature.
G. Executing the Campaign
1. The execution of an advertising campaign requires an extensive amount of planning and coordination.
2. Implementation requires detailed schedules to ensure that various phases of the work are completed on time. Advertising management personnel must evaluate the quality of work and take corrective action when necessary.
H. Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness
1. There are a variety of ways to test the effectiveness of advertising.
a) Measuring achievement of advertising objectives
b) Assessing the effectiveness of copy, illustrations, or layout
c) Evaluating certain media
2. Advertising can be evaluated before, during, and after the campaign.
a) Evaluations performed before the campaign begins are called pretests. To pretest advertisements, marketers sometimes use a consumer jury, which consists of a number of persons who are actual or potential buyers of the advertised product.
(1) During such a test, jurors are asked to judge one or several dimensions of two or more advertisements.
(2) Such tests are based on the belief that consumers are more likely than advertising experts to know what will influence them.
b) To measure advertising effectiveness during a campaign, marketers usually rely on inquiries.
(1) In the initial stages of a campaign, an advertiser may use several advertisements simultaneously, each containing a coupon, form, or toll-free number through which potential customers can request information.
(2) The advertiser records the number of inquiries returned and determines which advertisement generated the most response.
c) Evaluation of advertising effectiveness after the campaign is called a posttest. Advertising objectives often determine what kind of posttest is appropriate.
(1) If the objectives focus on communication, then the posttest should measure changes in dimensions such as product awareness, brand awareness, or customer attitudes.
(2) For campaign objectives stated in terms of sales, the posttest should measure changes in dimensions such as sales or market share.
(3) Posttest methods based on memory include recognition and recall tests.
(a) In a recognition test, individual respondents are shown the actual advertisement and asked whether they recognize it.
(b) Recall can be measured through either unaided or aided recall methods. An unaided recall test is a posttest that asks subjects to identify recently seen ads but does not provide any clues. An aided recall test is a posttest that asks subjects to identify recently seen ads and provides clues to jog their memories.
(c) The major justification for using recognition and recall methods is that individuals are more likely to buy the product if they can remember an advertisement than if they cannot remember it.
III. Who Develops the Advertising Campaign?
A. In very small firms, one or two individuals are responsible for performing advertising activities. Usually, these individuals depend heavily on personnel at local newspapers and broadcast stations for artwork, copywriting, and advice about scheduling media.
B. In certain large businesses, and especially large retail organizations, advertising departments create and implement advertising campaigns. Depending on the size of the advertising program, an advertising department may consist of a few multiskilled persons or a sizable number of specialists such as copywriters, artists, media buyers, and technical production coordinators.
C. When an organization uses an advertising agency, the development of the advertising campaign is usually a joint effort of the agency and the firm.
1. The degree to which each participates in the campaign’s total development depends on the working relationship between the firm and the agency. The firm ordinarily relies on the agency for copywriting, artwork, technical production, and formulation of the media plan.
2. An advertising agency can assist a business in several ways.
a) An agency, especially a large one, can supply the services of highly skilled specialists—not only copywriters, artists, and production coordinators but also media experts, researchers, and legal advisers.
b) Agency personnel often have broad experience in advertising and are usually more objective than the firm’s employees about the organization’s products.
c) The services of an advertising agency can be obtained at a low or moderate cost because the agency usually receives its compensation through a 15 percent commission paid by the media from which it makes purchases.
IV. Public Relations
A. Public relations is a broad set of communication efforts used to create and maintain favorable relationships between an organization and its stakeholders, both internal and external.
1. Public relations can be used to promote people, places, ideas, activities, and even countries.
2. Public relations focuses on enhancing the image of the total organization.
3. Because the public’s attitudes toward a firm are likely to affect the sales of its products, it is very important for firms to maintain positive public perceptions.
(Building Customer Relationships: PR Battles)
B. Public Relations Tools
Companies use a variety of public relations tools to convey messages and create images.
1. Public relations material such as brochures, newsletters, company magazines, and annual reports reach and influence the various stakeholders.
2. Corporate identity material such as logos, business cards, stationery, and signs are created to make a firm immediately recognizable.
3. Speeches can affect the organization’s image.
4. Event sponsorship, in which a company pays for part or all of a special event, is an effective means of increasing brand recognition with relatively minimal investment.
5. Publicity, which is a part of public relations, is communication in news story form about an organization, its products, or both, transmitted through a mass medium at no charge.
(Transparency Figure 19C)
a) The most common publicity-based tool is the news release, or press release, which is usually a single page of typewritten copy containing fewer than 300 words and describing a company event or product.
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b) A feature article is a manuscript of up to 3,000 words prepared for a specific publication.
c) A captioned photograph is a photograph with a brief description explaining the picture’s content.
d) A press conference is a meeting called to announce major news events.
e) Publicity-based public relations tools offer several advantages, including credibility, news value, significant word-of-mouth communications, and a perception of being endorsed by the media, as well as a relatively low cost.
f) Publicity-based public relations tools also have some limitations.
(1) Marketers cannot control whether the media choose to publish them at all.
(2) Marketers can control neither the content nor the timing of the communication.
C. Evaluating Public Relations Effectiveness
1. Because of the potential benefits of good public relations, it is essential that organizations evaluate the effectiveness of their public relations campaigns.
2. Research can be conducted to determine how well a firm is communicating its messages to target audiences.
a) "Environmental monitoring" identifies changes in public opinion affecting an organization.
b) A "public relations audit" is used to assess an organization’s image among the public or to evaluate the effect of a specific public relations program.
c) A "communications audit" may include a content analysis of messages, a readability study, or a readership survey.
d) A "social audit" measures the extent to which stakeholders view an organization as responsible.
3. One approach to measuring the effectiveness of publicity-based public relations is to count the number of exposures in the media.
4. Although counting the number of media exposures does not reveal how many people have actually read or heard the company’s message or what they though about the message afterward, measuring changes in product awareness, knowledge, and attitudes resulting from the publicity campaign can provide this information.
D. Dealing with Unfavorable Public Relations
1. A single negative event that produces unfavorable public relations can wipe out a company’s favorable image and destroy positive consumer attitudes that took years to build through expensive advertising campaigns and other types of promotional efforts.
2. To protect its image, an organization needs to prevent unfavorable public relations or at least lessen its effect should it occur.
3. Because negative events can happen to even the most cautious firms, organizations should have predetermined plans in place to handle them when they do occur so as to reduce the adverse impact.
4. By being forthright with the press and public and taking prompt action, firms may be able to convince the public of their honest attempts to deal with the situation, and news personnel may be more willing to help explain complex issues to the public.