Advertising decisions are those decisions which are related to the promotion of goods and services through identified sponsors.
When developing an advertising program, marketing management must take these significant major advertising decisions, which are as bellow
Major Advertising Decisions in Marketing
- Setting Advertising Objectives
- Setting advertising budgets
- Developing Advertising Strategy
- Evaluating Advertising Campaigns
These are now discussed one by one.
Setting Advertising Objectives
In developing advertising program, the first step is to set advertising objectives. These goals should be founded on the past decisions about marketing mix, positioning and the target market which specify the duty that advertising should perform in total marketing program.
See Also: Major Retailer Marketing Decisions
An advertising goal is a particular communication activity to be achieved with a particular target audience during a particular period of time.
Following are the classification of advertising goals by primary purpose as
- Informative Advertising
- Persuasive advertising
- Comparison Advertising
- Reminder Advertising
Setting the Advertising Budget
The marketer should establish the advertising budget for each product & market after determining its advertising goals.
There are four popular methods for establishing promotion budgets. In establishing the promotion budgets is not easy activity.
Some critics charge that business to business firms under spends on the advertising and large consumer goods firms spend heavy amount on the advertising.
During the establishment of advertising budgets, some particular factors that should be considered are as follow
- Stage in the product life cycle: Large advertising budgets are required in new products.
- Market Share: Increased market share brands generally require more advertising.
- Competition & Clutter: Enhanced advertising is generally needed in a market where there is enhanced competition and their advertising clutter.
- Product Differentiation: More advertising is required when a brand deeply resembles other brands in its class.
Developing Advertising Strategy
Advertising strategy comprised of two main elements which are
Selecting Advertising Messages: Advertising can become successful only if commercials get attention and communicate properly, no matter how large the budget is.
In recent costly & split advertising environment, good advertising messages are significant. If some consumers are bothers from all this culler advertising than it will also create large problems for advertisers.
For advertisers, television viewers were beautiful much a captive audience until recently. Viewers have minimum channels from which to select.
Recently viewer has much more options with the growth in satellite TV, cable, remote-control units, and VCRs. By watching commercial-free cable channels, they can avoid ads, In fact when the commercial break starts half of the all television viewers switch channels, as founded by recent study.
In order to acquire and maintain attention, recently advertising messages should be properly planned, more entertaining, more imaginative, and more rewarding to the consumers.
In order to get the attention of the products, intentionally controversial ads are produced by some advertisers that can break through the clutter. It further contains two categories.
- Message Strategy
- Message Execution
Selecting Advertising Media: Media selection includes the following main steps.
- Deciding on frequency, reach and impact.
- Selecting among main media kinds.
- Choosing particular media vehicles.
- Deciding on media timings.
Evaluating Advertising
The evaluation of the campaign is the fourth step in advertising campaign. Both the sales effects and communication effects of the advertising program should be regularly evaluated.
See Also: Channel Design Decisions Steps
The communication effects of an ad are measured by copy testing which tells whether the ad is communicating properly. Copy testing can be performed after or before an ad is broadcast or printed.
The consumers are shown the ad by the advertiser before the ad is placed, so that likeness, recall and attitude changes of customers resulting from it can be measured.
After the ad is run, the advertiser can evaluate how the ad influenced the product awareness or consumer recall, preference and knowledge.
