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In developing an advertising program, marketing managers must always start by identifying the target market and buyer motives. From here they can make five major decisions, known as “the five Ms.”

Then they can make the five major decisions, known as “the five Ms”:Mission:What are our advertising objectives? Money: How much can we spend and how do we allocate our spending across media types? Message: What message should we send? Media: What media should we use? Measurement: How should we evaluate the results?

The advertising objectives must flow from prior decisions on target market, brand positioning, and the marketing program. An advertising objective (or goal) is a specific communications task and achievement level to be accomplished with a specific audience in a specific period of time.

Advertising objectives are classified based on whether their aim is to inform, persuade, remind, or reinforce. These objectives correspond to different stages in the hierarchy-of-effects model outline in chapter 17.

Informative advertising – aims to create brand awareness and knowledge of new products or new features of existing products.

Persuasive advertising – aims to create liking, preference, conviction, and purchase of a product or service. Some persuasive advertising uses comparative advertising, which makes an explicit comparison of the attributes of two or more brands.

Reminder advertising – aims to stimulate repeat purchase of products and services.

Reinforcement advertising - aims to convince current purchasers that they made the right choice. Automobile ads often depict satisfied customers enjoying special features of their new car.

Although advertising is treated as a current expense, part of it is really an investment in building brand equity and customer loyalty.

1. Stage in the product life cycle—New products typically merit large advertising budgets to build awareness and to gain consumer trial. Established brands usually are supported with lower advertising budgets, measured as a ratio to sales.

2. Market share and consumer base—High-market-share brands usually require less advertising expenditure as a percentage of sales to maintain share. To build share by increasing market size requires larger expenditures.

3. Competition and clutter—In a market with a large number of competitors and high advertising spending, a brand must advertise more heavily to be heard. Even simple clutter from advertisements not directly competitive to the brand creates a need for heavier advertising.

4. Advertising frequency—The number of repetitions needed to put the brand’s message across to consumers has an obvious impact on the advertising budget.

5. Product substitutability—Brands in less-differentiated or commodity-like product classes (beer, soft drinks, banks, and airlines) require heavy advertising to establish a unique image.

ADVERTISING ELASTICITY The predominant response function for advertising is often concave but can be S-shaped. When consumer response is S-shaped, some positive amount of advertising is necessary to generate any sales impact, but sales increases eventually flatten out.

In designing and evaluating an ad campaign, marketers employ both art and science to develop the message strategy or positioning of an ad—what the ad attempts to convey about the brand—and its creative strategy—how the ad expresses the brand claims. Advertisers go through three steps: message generation and evaluation, creative development and execution, and social-responsibility review.

Message generation and evaluation: A good ad normally focuses on one or two core selling propositions. As part of refining the brand positioning, the advertiser should conduct market research to determine which appeal works best with its target audience and then prepare a creative brief, typically one or two pages. This is an elaboration of the positioning statement and includes considerations such as key message, target audience, communications objectives (to do, to know, to believe), key brand benefits, supports for the brand promise, and media.

Creative Development and Execution: The ad’s impact depends not only on what it says, but often more important, on how it says it. Execution can be decisive.

Legal and Social Issues: To break through clutter, some advertisers believe they have to be edgy and push the boundaries of what consumers are used to seeing in advertising. In doing so, marketers must be sure advertising does not overstep social and legal norms21 or offend the general public, ethnic groups, racial minorities, or special-interest groups.

After choosing the message, the advertiser’s next task is to choose media to carry it. The steps here are deciding on desired reach, frequency, and impact; choosing among major media types; selecting specific media vehicles; deciding on media timing; and deciding on geographical media allocation. Then the marketer evaluates the results of these decisions.

• Reach (R). The number of different persons or households exposed to a particular media schedule at least once during a specified time period

• Frequency (F). The number of times within the specified time period that an average person or household is exposed to the message

• Impact (I). The qualitative value of an exposure through a given medium (thus a food ad will have a higher impact in Good Housekeeping than in Fortune magazine)

Place advertising, or out-of-home advertising, is a broad category including many creative and unexpected forms to grab consumers’ attention. The rationale is that marketers are better off reaching people where they work, play, and, of course, shop. Popular options include billboards, public spaces, product placement, and point of purchase.

Public Spaces  - Advertisers have been increasingly placing ads in unconventional places such as on movie screens, on airplanes, and in fitness clubs, as well as in classrooms, sports arenas, office and hotel elevators, and other public places.33 Billboard-type poster ads are showing up everywhere. Transit ads on buses, subways, and commuter trains—around for years—have become a valuable way to reach working women.“Street furniture”—bus shelters, kiosks, and public areas—is another fast-growing option.

Product Placement -  Marketers pay product placement fees of $100,000 to as much as $500,000 so their products will make cameo appearances in movies and on television. Sometimes placements are the result of a larger network advertising deal, but other times they are the work of small product-placement shops that maintain ties with prop masters, set designers, and production executives.

Point of Purchase (P-O-P)  - The appeal of point-of-purchase advertising lies in the fact that in many product categories consumers make the bulk of their final brand decisions in the store, 74 percent according to one study. There are many ways to communicate with consumers at the point of purchase: in-store advertising includes ads on shopping carts, cart straps, aisles, and shelves, as well as promotion options such as in-store demonstrations, live sampling, and instant coupon machines.

Billboards - Billboards have been transformed and now use colorful, digitally produced graphics, backlighting, sounds, movement, and unusual—even 3D—images.

In selecting a media vehicle the planner must know the size of a media vehicles audience (readers, viewers, listeners, etc), the composition of the audience, and the cost of the media.

For a pet food marketer, reaching a large audience (size) is only beneficial if a large enough number of the audience are pet owners (composition). The cost to reach the audience, through a specific media vehicle must be weighed against other media vehicles.

Macroscheduling – Relates to seasons and the business cycle. If, for example, 70% of product sales occur during the summer, the firm can vary its ad spending to follow the season pattern.

Microscheduling – Maximum impact in short period of time to gain maximum impact.

In launching a new product, the advertiser must choose among continuity, concentration, flighting, and pulsing.

Continuity  - means exposures appear evenly throughout a given period. Generally, advertisers use continuous advertising in expanding market situations, with frequently purchased items, and in tightly defined buyer categories.

Concentration  - calls for spending all the advertising dollars in a single period. This makes sense for products with one selling season or related holiday.

Flighting calls for advertising during a period, followed by a period with no advertising, followed by a second period of advertising activity. It is useful when funding is limited, the purchase cycle is relatively infrequent, or items are seasonal.

Pulsing  - is continuous advertising at low-weight levels, reinforced periodically by waves of heavier activity. It draws on the strength of continuous advertising and flights to create a compromise scheduling strategy. Those who favor pulsing believe the audience will learn the message more thoroughly, and at a lower cost to the firm.

Communication-effect research, called copy testing, seeks to determine whether an ad is communicating effectively. Marketers should perform this test both before an ad is put into media (pre-test) and after it is printed or broadcast (posttest).

Many advertisers use posttests to assess the overall impact of a completed campaign. If a company hoped to increase brand awareness from 20 percent to 50 percent and succeeded in increasing it to only 30 percent, then the company is not spending enough, its ads are poor, or it has overlooked some other factor.

Sales-effect Research - What sales are generated by an ad that increases brand awareness by 20 percent and brand preference by 10 percent? The fewer or more controllable other factors such as features and price are, the easier it is to measure advertising’s effect on sales. The sales

impact is easiest to measure in direct marketing situations and hardest in brand or corporate image-building advertising.

Sales promotion, a key ingredient in marketing campaigns, consists of a collection of incentive tools, mostly short term, designed to stimulate quicker or greater purchase of particular products or services by consumers or the trade.

Whereas advertising offers a reason to buy, sales promotion offers an incentive. Sales promotion includes tools for consumer promotion (samples, coupons, cash refund offers, prices off, premiums, prizes, patronage rewards, free trials, warranties, tie-in promotions, cross-promotions, point-of-purchase displays, and demonstrations), trade promotion (prices off, advertising and display allowances, and free goods), and business and sales force promotion (trade shows and conventions, contests for sales reps, and specialty advertising).

Sales promotion tools vary in their specific objectives. A free sample stimulates consumer trial, whereas a free management-advisory service aims at cementing a long-term relationship with a retailer. Sellers use incentive-type promotions to attract new triers, to reward loyal customers, and to increase the repurchase rates of occasional users. Sales promotions often attract brand switchers, who are primarily looking for low price, good value, or premiums. If some of them would not have otherwise tried the brand, promotion can yield long-term increases in market share.

In using sales promotion, a company must establish its objectives, select the tools, develop the program, pretest the program, implement and control it, and evaluate the results.

The promotion planner should take into account the type of market, sales promotion objectives, competitive conditions, and each tool’s

cost-effectiveness.

Marketers use events and experiences for a variety of reasons.

Becoming part of a personally relevant moment in consumers’ lives through events and experiences can broaden and deepen a company or brand’s relationship with the target market.

CHOOSING EVENTS Because of the number of opportunities and their huge cost, many marketers are becoming more selective about choosing sponsorship events. The event must meet the marketing objectives and communication strategy defined for the brand. The audience must match the target market. The event must have sufficient awareness, possess the desired image, and be capable of  creating the desired effects.

DESIGNING SPONSORSHIP PROGRAMS Many marketers believe the marketing program accompanying an event sponsorship ultimately determines its success. At least two to three times the amount of the sponsorship expenditure should be spent on related marketing activities.

MEASURING SPONSORSHIP ACTIVITIES It’s a challenge to measure the success of events. The supply-side measurement method focuses on potential exposure to the brand by assessing the extent of media coverage, and the demand-side method focuses on exposure reported by consumers.

A large part of local, grassroots marketing is experiential marketing, which not only communicates features and benefits but also connects a product or service with unique and interesting experiences. “The idea is not to sell something, but to demonstrate how a brand can enrich a customer’s life.”

Companies can even create a strong image by inviting prospects and customers to visit their headquarters and factories. Ben &

Jerry’s, Boeing, Crayola, and Hershey’s all sponsor excellent company tours that draw millions of visitors a year. Companies such as

Hallmark, Kohler, and Beiersdorf (makers of NIVEA) have built corporate museums at or near their headquarters that display their

history and the drama of producing and marketing their products.

Not only must the company relate constructively to customers, suppliers, and dealers, it must also relate to a large number of interested publics. A public is any group that has an actual or potential interest in or impact on a company’s ability to achieve its objectives. Public relations (PR) includes a variety of programs to promote or protect a company’s image or individual products.

1. Press relations—Presenting news and information about the organization in the most positive light

2. Product publicity—Sponsoring efforts to publicize specific products

3. Corporate communications—Promoting understanding of the organization through internal and external communications

4. Lobbying—Dealing with legislators and government officials to promote or defeat legislation and regulation

5. Counseling—Advising management about public issues, and company positions and image during good times and bad

Many companies are turning to marketing public relations (MPR) to support corporate or product promotion and image making. MPR, like financial PR and community PR, serves a special constituency, the marketing department. The old name for MPR was publicity, the task of securing editorial space—as opposed to paid space—in print and broadcast media to promote or “hype” a product, service, idea, place, person, or organization.

In considering when and how to use MPR, management must establish the marketing objectives, choose the PR messages and vehicles, implement the plan carefully, and evaluate the results.

ESTABLISHING OBJECTIVES MPR can build awareness by placing stories in the media to bring attention to a product, service, person, organization, or idea. It can build credibility by communicating the message in an editorial context. It can help boost sales force and dealer enthusiasm with stories about a new product before it is launched. It can hold down promotion cost because MPR costs less than direct mail and media advertising.

CHOOSING MESSAGES AND VEHICLES Suppose a relatively unknown college wants more visibility. The MPR practitioner will search for stories. Are any faculty members working on unusual projects? Are any new and unusual courses being taught? Are any interesting events taking place on campus? If there are no interesting stories, the MPR practitioner should propose newsworthy events the college could sponsor.

IMPLEMENTING THE PLAN AND EVALUATING RESULTS MPR’s contribution to the bottom line is difficult to measure, because it is used along with other promotional tools. The easiest measure of MPR effectiveness is the number of exposures carried by the media. Publicists supply the client with a clippings book showing all the media that carried news about the product and a summary statement