No BS Grassroots Marketing Inconvenient Truth 2 - Don't Promote Your Yellow P...
Marketing Products Through Advertising
1. Advertising is the art of promoting the sales of goods or
services based on a market selection. It is affected through
various media, particularly through newspapers,
magazines, radios and T.V. services and bill boards along
the highways. Advertising affects the market in one way or
another. Expenditures on advertisements amount to large
sums of money and they are rising every year.
2. The fact that expenditures on advertising are increasing
from year to year indicates that advertising is important to
market a product or services. As a country becomes more
industrialized and as competition in business becomes
keener for the firms, marketing strategy through
advertising will become more important and expenditures
on advertising will rise.
3. Advertising is regarded as "the life-blood of marketing"
simply because it gives information to prospective
consumers of the goods or services which are made
available in the market. It tells a group of selected market
of the existence of a new product or of new uses for or
new or better qualities of an existing product, or reminds
a market of the existence of a product. Without such
information given through the various advertising media,
the prospective market may not be aware of the existence
or the uses of a product and the producer may not be able
to sell it. A product that is not sold or cannot be sold is of
no value to the producer and to the selected market.
Therefore, it is obvious that informative advertising is very
important to a firm or to an industry and is also important
to consumers and the market at large.
4. Generally, advertising as practiced by most firms is
competitive rather than informative in motive. This is
particularly true where there is a great deal of product
differentiation brought about by the practice of branding a
product. A firm advertizes mainly because it wants to push
the sales of its products. When its products are
differentiated from the products of other firms by just its
brand, then it hopes to increase the sales of its branded
products to their selected markets. It can do so by
marketing, through advertising techniques, to create a
special image for its brand of products and to build up
brand loyalty for its products to a given markets.
5. Once customers' loyalty for its brand of products is
established, the demand for its products will be less price-
elastic and it is able to make some monopoly profits to a
given specified markets. Competitive advertising, as we
can see, is wasteful. Experts may tell us that there is no
real difference, physically or chemically, between different
brands of a product.
6. Whatever difference there may be between two brands is
strictly psychological in nature built up through large sums
of money spent on marketing through advertising
campaigns. It can, therefore, be argued that the
consumers would benefit more if firms spent less on
competitive advertising and passed on their savings to
consumers in the form of lower prices or in the form of
genuinely better quality products obtained through more
research which could be made possible with savings from
unnecessary marketing activities.
7. However, it can be counter-argued that competitive
advertising may not be a waste after all, because very
often a consumer derives extra satisfaction from owning
or consuming a widely-advertized product. Since he
obtains more satisfaction, the higher price which he has to
pay for the product because of the advertising is,
therefore, justified.
8. Further, it can be pointed out that because of the large
amount of revenue from marketing activities through
advertising, newspapers and magazines are sold more
cheaply to readers and they are within the reach of more
people and, further, radio and T.V. stations are able to
produce or buy better or more programs. Also, the
advertising industry itself gains with more jobs created for
the market community.
9. In conclusion, it can be said that one cannot deny that
marketing trough advertising is the life-blood of industry.
But it is really difficult to conclude that it is a waste of
economic resources because much depends on one's
judgment of what is good or bad for the society.