Features of Advertising
Advertising means making purposeful efforts to promote
a product or service produced by a company.
Advertising has become an integral part of every
organization because of the tough competition in the market. Advertising can be considered as
fuel for a fire. Without additional fuel, there will be fire, but it will never
be enough to get something cooked.
However, adding fuel to the fire will produce enough heat
to get the food cooked. Therefore, it is important to understand the concept of
advertising to generate sales in order to make a profit.
Let us learn about the different features of advertising
to understand the concept of advertising better.
Features of Advertising
1. A mode of Communication
An advertisement helps in creating communication between
the consumer of the product and the company
which produces the product.
A customer will never buy a product if he is not familiar
with the brand and is not aware of the qualities that the product
has to offer. So, what a company should do to make the brand look familiar and
to share the qualities of the product with people? At this time, the role of advertising becomes
important.
By advertising your product at different platforms and
repetitively, you increase the familiarity of people with your brand and make
them aware of the goods that your product has to offer.
2. A paid service
Advertising is an art, and it requires skills. There are advertising companies
which offer advertising services to company and charge them heavily for the
services that they provide. However, sometimes companies end up paying billion
on an advertising campaign and don’t get effective results in return.
Effective advertising is that which generate much more
profit then what a company has paid to get the service.
3. A clear message
Nowadays, companies take help of fake advertising to
attract customers fast.
But remember one thing with fake advertising you might
attract customers for once, but when they do not get the results that you have
promised to deliver through your advertising, they will neither buy your
product again nor will they let their friends and known to buy your products.
Customers feel cheated when they do not get what they
were expecting and start making negative comments about your products whenever
they come across your product. Therefore, make sure that whatever you advertise
should be genuine in order to make life long customers.
4. A Target Group
An advertisement should be focused on a particular group.
For example, if you are selling a health drink for
children, then the target audience of the advertisement will be the children
aging between 5 years to 12 years, and if you are selling sanitary napkins,
then the target audience will see the women in the age group of 14 years to 40
years. Therefore, define your target audience before you decide to make the
advertisement.
This will also help you to choose the right platform for
advertising. For example, if you want to sell something to teenagers or youngsters,
then the right platform for advertising should be social media as most
youngsters are quite active on social media.
If you make a mistake in choosing the wrong advertising
platform and wrong target audience, then you might not get the sales as desired.
5. Publicity
Advertisement is a great mode of publicizing the product
of your company.
As I have mentioned before, people usually don’t buy the
products from the companies that they are not familiar with. If you observe
people in supermarkets, then you must have seen them leaving products by saying
I have never heard about it before.
By playing advertisement multiple times, you make people
become familiar with the brand name of the company. Therefore, by
using advertisements, you create the place of your brand in the market.
6. Persuasion
The main purpose of advertising is to persuade customers
to buy your product at the place of the products of your competitors and make
them believe that their purchase will be beneficial for them. However,
persuading a large group of people is not an easy task.
That too, when you can’t interact with every single
person face-to-face. In such scenarios, the creativity of the creator of an advertisement
will play an important role. Otherwise, people will switch the channel or skip the ad before they even watch your complete
advertisement.
7. Creativity
Creativity is an important feature of advertising. The
success of the advertising will depend on the creativity of the advertisement
and to create a creative advertisement you need to have created people with
creative minds. Take the example of an advertisement created by the dogs’ food
company “Pedigree.”
They used the two pictures of the same person with the
same background. In the first picture, a man is standing near the sea alone and
in the second picture a dog is standing next to the man with the tagline “A dog
makes your life happier, Adopt.”With the presence of a dog, a gloomy picture
turned into a happy picture. I still remember this ad, and whenever I want to
buy food for my dog, I think about pedigree.
Think about the Ad that you still remember. If you can
recall an ad within seconds, then you can understand the power of advertising
and can understand how important is this feature of advertising.
8. Entertainment
Another important feature of advertising is
“Entertainment.” By entertainment, it does not mean that you are required to
make your audience laugh by holding their stomach in their hands.
But by the word entertainment in advertising, I mean that
something that holds your audience and not let them switching the channels.
9. Impersonal
Advertising should be impersonal. You can make an ad for
a targeted group of people. That does not mean you can direct a message towards
an individual through advertising.
Contrary to this, in face-to-face promotion of products
through salesmanship message can be directed to a single individual. Targeting a particular group makes the
advertising effective, and this rule is applicable to all media types.
10. Language
The language of the advertisement is an important feature
of advertising. Companies usually make advertisements in local languages in
order to convey the message of advertisement effectively for the people of a
particular region or country.
11. Truth
Last
but not least, one of the most important features of advertising is the truth.
It is essential that all advertisements contain truthful information. Consumers
can take legal actions if the information conveyed in the advertisement is not
true.
Features
of Advertising
1. It is a paid form of
communication:
Advertisements appear in newspapers,
magazines, television or cinema screens because the advertiser has purchased
some space or time to communicate information to the prospective customers.
2. It is a non-personal
presentation of message:
There is no face-to-face contact with
the customers. That is why, it is described as non-personal salesmanship. It is
a non- personal form of presenting products and promoting ideas and it supports
personal selling. It simplifies the task of sales-force by creating awareness
in the minds of potential customers.
3. The purpose of advertising
is to promote idea about the products and services of a business:
It is directed towards increasing the
sale of the products and services of a business unit.
4. Advertisement is issued by
an identified sponsor:
The
identity of the businessman issuing the advertisement must be disclosed.
Non-disclosure of the name of the sponsor in propaganda may lead to distortion,
deception and manipulation. Advertisement should disclose the sources of
opinions and ideas it presents.
Advertising
- Features
1. Provides information – The
main feature of advertising is to provide information about the product to
potential buyers. It provides details like features, uses, prices, benefits,
manufacturer’s name and instructions for using the product effectively.
2. Paid communication – Businesses
select, assign and pay advertisers for preparing advertisements that include
the size, slogan, etc. These advertisers are asked to prepare a design or
format of the advertisement as per the products and requirements of the
businesses.
3. Non-personal presentation –
Advertisement is a non-personal presentation, which means that media tools like
television, radio, newspaper, etc., are considered that reaches out to a large
number of people.
4. Publicity – As advertisement
provides information about the product; advertising provides publicity to
goods, services and ideas. Advertising provides flow and movement of
information with the aim of increasing public awareness of a subject. For
example, Hindustan Unilever Ltd. (HUL)’s Project Sunlight has recently launched
‘Bright Future Speeches’ wherein the Indian youth raises concerns about the
need for sanitation and hygiene through films and television advertisements
(HUL, 2014).
5. For persuasion – The main
feature of advertising is to persuade and attract potential customers to new
ideas that lead to probable sale of products. This means that the information
needs to be believable and convincing that the product is better than their
competitive products.
6. Target oriented –
Advertisements are developed that caters to the needs and wants of target
customers and markets. Advertisements depict target customers and markets by
relevant characters, themes, props, slogans, select storylines and so on. For
example, protein health drinks like Horlicks, Complan, etc., are targeted
towards children representing young urban India and emotions are targeted
towards excelling in studies, sports and tackling competition.
7. Creativity – Creativity plays a critical role in advertising,
which involves presenting a product in an artistic, attractive and agreeable
manner.
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