MBA Notes - Introduction to Advertising
Question - “Advertising is a nonpersonal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media." Explain.
Answer
Meaning of Advertising - Advertising is an activity of attracting public attention to a product, service, or business as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.
Definition of Advertising - "Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media." Now let's take this statement apart and see what it means.
Non-personal
Basically sales is done either personally or non-personally. Personal selling requires the seller and buyer to get together. Personal selling has its on advantages and disadvantages. Whereas advertising is non-personal selling. Personal selling has many advantages over advertising like direct communication, bargaining, enough time to discuss in detail about the product, seller can easily locate potential buyer. Advertising has none of the advantages of personal selling, very little time to present sales message, message is cannot be changed easily.
But, advertising has its own advantages which is not found in personal selling: advertising has comparatively speaking, all the time in the world. Unlike personal selling, the sales message and its presentation does not have to be created on the spot with the customer watching. It can be created in as many ways as the writer can conceive, be rewritten, tested, modified, injected with every trick and appeal known to affect consumers.
Advertising covers large groups of customer and to make it effective proper research about customer is done to identify potential customers, to find out what message element might influence them, and figure out how best to get that message to them.
Thus, it appears that advertising is a good idea as a sales tool. For small ticket items, such as chewing gum and guitar picks, advertising is cost effective to do the entire selling job. For large ticket items, such as cars and computers, advertising can do a large part of the selling job, and personal selling is used to complete and close the sale.
Advertising is nonpersonal, but effective.
Communication
Communication means passing information, ideas, or feelings by a person to another. Communication uses all the senses like smell, touch, taste, sound, sight. Only two senses - sound and sight are really useful in advertising. In advertising, what appears is everything the writer thinks the customer needs to know about the product in order to make a decision about the product. That information will generally be about how the product can benefit the customer.
Paid For
Advertiser has to pay for the creation of ad and for placing it in the media. Cost of ad creation and cost of time/space in the media must be paid for. Cost of advertising depends on TRP of media, reach of media, and frequency of ad to be displayed.
Persuasive
"Persuasive" stands to reason as part of the definition of advertising. The basic purpose of advertising is to identify and differentiate one product from another in order to persuade the consumer to buy that product in preference to another.
Identified Sponsors
Identified sponsors means whoever is putting out the ad tells the audience who they are. There are two reasons for this: first, it's a legal requirement, and second, it makes good sense. Legally, a sponsor must identify himself as the sponsor of ad. By doing so the sponsor not only fulfills the legal requirements, but it also makes a good sense, if the sponsor doesn't do so, the audience may believe that the ad is for any competitor's product, thus wasting all the time and money in making and placing the ad.
