Aiou MBA: Promotion and advertising

The answers to these ﬁve questions underpin all advertising and promotional strategies:

What do you want to happen?
If that happens, how much is it worth?
What message will make it happen?
What media will work best?
How will you measure the eﬀectiveness of your eﬀort and expense?

What do you want to happen?

Do you want prospective customers to visit your website; phone, write to you or e-mail you; return a card; or send an order in the post? Do you expect them to have an immediate need to which you want them to respond now, or is it that you want them to remember you at some future date when they have a need for whatever it is you are selling?

The more you are able to identify a speciﬁc response in terms of orders, visits, phone calls or requests for literature, the better your promotional eﬀort will be tailored to achieve your objective, and the more clearly you will be able to assess the eﬀectiveness of your promotion and its cost versus its yield.

How much is that worth to you?

Once you know what you want a particular promotional activity to achieve,it becomes a little easier to estimate its cost. Suppose a Rs.1,000 advertisement is expected to generate 100 enquiries for your product. If experience tells you that on average 10 per cent of enquiries result in orders, and your proﬁt margin is Rs.200 per product, then you can expect an extra Rs.2,000 proﬁt. That ‘beneﬁt’ is much greater than the Rs.1,000 cost of the advertisement, so it seems a worthwhile investment. Then, with your target in mind, decide how much to spend on advertising each month, revising that ﬁgure in the light of experience.

Deciding the message

Your promotional message must be built around facts about the company and about the product. The stress here is on the word ‘fact’, and while there may be many types of fact surrounding you and your products, your customers are interested in only two: the facts that inﬂuence their buying decisions, and the ways in which your business and its products stand out from the competition.

These facts must be translated into beneﬁts.There is sometimes an assumption that everyone buys only for obvious, logical reasons, when we all know of innumerable examples showing this is not so. Do people buy new clothes only when the old ones are worn out? Do bosses have desks that are bigger than their subordinates’ because they have more papers to put on them?

The message should follow the AIDA formula: get Attention, capture Interest, create Desire and encourage Action. Looking at each in turn:

Getting attention requires a hook. Color, humor and design are tools used to focus people on your oﬀer and away from the masses of distracting clutter that occupy minds.

Interest is achieved by involving people in some aspect of the product, perhaps by posing a question such as one diet company does with its challenge ‘would you like to loose 2 kg in 2 weeks?’.

Desire is about showing people the end result they could achieve by having or using your product. Every speedboat advertisement has a beautiful girl posing , the inference being that if you owned the boat you would be sure to get the girl too.

Action means provoking a painless way for people to start the buying process. Free trial, money-back guarantee, oﬀer only lasts this week and so forth are examples of the strategies used to achieve this result.

UACCA – Unawareness, Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction, Action is another acronym used in this context.

Choosing the media

Your market research should produce a clear understanding of who your potential customer group are, which in turn will provide pointers as to how to reach them. But even when you know whom you want to reach with your advertising message it’s not always plain sailing.

Above or below the line

Advertising media are usually clustered under two headings, above the line and below the line. It has to be said that the line is becoming increasingly indistinct but it is still a term that is part of the lexicon in seeing the advertising budget.

Above the line

Above the line (ATL) involves using conventional impersonal mass media to promote products and services, talking at the consumer. Major above-the-line techniques include:

TV, cinema and radio advertising: The vast array of local newspapers, TV channels and digital radio stations can make this a more targeted advertising strategy than has been the case.
Print advertising in newspapers, magazines, directories and classiﬁed ads: Print of all forms has the merit of having a long life, so it can be used for handling more complex messages than, say, radio or TV.
Internet banner ads act as a point of entry for a more detailed advert.
Search engines: Search engine advertising comes in two main forms.
PPC (pay per click) is where you buy options on certain key words so that someone searching for a product will see your ‘advertisement’ to the side of the natural search results. Google, for example, oﬀers a deal where you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and you can set a daily budget stating how much you are prepared to spend, with $5 a day as the starting price.
Podcasts, where internet users can download sound and video free, are now an important part of the E-advertising armoury.
Posters and billboards.

Below the line

Below the line (BTL) talks to the consumer in a more personal way using such media as:

Direct mail – leaﬂets, ﬂyers, brochures: Response rates are notoriously
low, less than 1 per cent resulting in sale, but direct mail has the merit of being a proven method of reaching speciﬁc targeted market segments.
Direct e-mail and viral marketing: The latter is the process of creating something so hot that the recipients will pass it on to friends and colleagues, creating extra demand as it rolls out. Jokes, games, pictures, quizzes and surveys are examples.
Sales promotions, including point of sales material: Activities carried out in this area include free samples, try before you buy, discounts, coupons, incentives and rebates, contests, and special events such as fairs and exhibitions.
PR (public relations): This is about presenting yourself and your business in a favorable light to your various ‘publics’ – at little or no cost. It is also a more inﬂuential method of communication than general advertising – people believe editorials. There may also be times when you have to deal with the press – anything from when you are trying to get attention for a new product to handling an adverse situation, say if your product has to be recalled for quality reasons, or worse.
Letterheads, stationery and business cards are often overlooked in the battle for customer attention, but are in fact often the ﬁrst and perhaps only way in which a business’s image is projected.
Blogs, where the opinions and experiences of particular groups of people are shared using online communities such as MySpace, for example, are an extension of this idea. Neilson NetRatings reported in 2008 that over 2 billion community sites are viewed every month in the UK alone.

Push or pull

Like above or below the line, push and pull are diﬀerent advertising strategies used for achieving diﬀerent results. Pull advertising is geared to drawing visitors into your net if they are actively looking for your type of product or service. Search engines, listings in on- and oﬀ-line directories, Yellow Pages and shopping portals are examples here.

Push advertising tries to get the word out to groups of potential customers in the hope that some of them will be considering making a purchase at about that time. Magazines, newspapers, TV, banner ads and direct mail both on- and oﬀ-line are examples here.

As with above and below the line, the distinctions are fast becoming blurred, but the message used in your advertising will be diﬀerent. With pull there is the assumption that people want to buy, and they just need convincing that they should buy from you. Push calls for a diﬀerent message convincing them of their need and desire in the ﬁrst place.