Effective Marketing Strategies: Advertising vs. Public Relations (Part I)

Marketing includes advertising and public relations among other strategies, can extensively influence the success of an organization. This article aims to familiarize the reader with the terms of advertising and public relations individually and then discusses advertising vs. public relations.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as the activities, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The contribution of marketing, to the success of any business is highly significant. In fact, marketing has the power to determine the success of a particular product or service launched. Effective marketing involves application of many strategies, two of which are: advertising and public relations. We shall attempt to understand these two terms in the following discussion. Henceforth, in this article, the use of the term product will refer to both, a service or a product that is to be marketed.

Effective Marketing Strategy: Advertising

Advertising refers to any form of paid and impersonal presentation of ideas, goods or services by an identified sponsor.

Advertising Types

•Informative Advertising: This includes the advertisements that aim to provide the customer with information about the product. This form of advertisement informs the customer about the various features and the benefits of using the product.

•Persuasive Advertising: The objective of this form of advertisements is to persuade the consumer to buy a particular product or employ a service offered. It usually includes some attractive additional features or special offers that will further entice the customer to buy a product.

•Comparative Advertising: These types of advertisements, indirectly or directly, compare the product to be marketed with another of a similar type. Generally, when there are only a few (usually, two) major players in the market, one or all of these business competitors use this advertising strategy.

•Rememorative Advertising: Advertising done through this type is usually in case of a product that is well-established and has a strong-hold on the market. This type of advertising is used only to remind the consumer about the product.

Advertising Graph

•Growth phase: The function of advertising assumes immense importance at the onset or launch of a product. The advertising is usually in full swing in this phase. All the advertising techniques are put to use in this stage. Initially, informative advertising is employed. In the latter part of this phase, informative as well as persuasive advertising is utilized.

•Established phase: Once the product has established a standing in the market, a combination of persuasive, comparative and rememorative advertising is observed with informative advertising kept at its lowest.

•Declining phase: In this phase, the whole process of advertising is suppressed. Rememorative advertising may be used in isolated cases. If there exists any chance of revival of the product, a novel advertising approach may be applied.

Objectives of Advertising

•To generate awareness, about a product or a service offered.

•To inform the consumer about the various features of the product or service.

•To induce the customer to buy the product or avail the services offered.



Secrets for Good Advertising

•Repetition of advertisements

•Strategic placement of advertisements (including time)

•Target market considerations and segmentation while advertising

•Quality of advertisements

•Form of advertising

Both advertising and public relations can be used as tools for branding. It is important to remember that advertising or public relations alone will never comprise of the marketing strategy of an organization for its product. A combination of both is mandatory for effective business marketing and in order to ensure the success of a product.

See Part II of Ketaki's article where public relations strategies are discussed.

By Ketaki Borkar
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