Discuss advertising's ability to support marketing issues

This essay aims to outline and discuss specific issues and concepts related to marketing, in particular the influence that advertising has on branded products and their consumption. This essay uses Advertising and Promotion- Communicating Brands by Chris Hackley as a core theoretical text. Using specific ‘branded’ products and companies as examples, this essay will examine how the advertising industry supports the marketing trade, and to what extent. Different aspects of the trade will be used in order to highlight the support that advertising provides marketing issues with. These include; new product launches, repositioning, segmentation, targeting and branding as well as the discussion of the new media environment and its influence on the trade.
Branding is a technique used by most companies in order to differentiate their product from the rest. Advertising provides brands with their competitive status and demonstrates product ‘significance in social life that reaches beyond mere product consumption’ (Hackley, 2005:59). The advertiser therefore, knows the importance of both the consumer and the non-consumer. Most popular brand names have an air of superiority about them and overshadow their competitors and lesser-known products. Slick corporate images can be represented and conveyed through branding and advertising.
Successful branding through advertising is a process that takes both marketing and advertising know-how. Hackley describes the communications through advertising as the ‘tip of an iceberg […] with a far more substantial structure unseen beneath’ (Hackley, 2005:62). The tip of the iceberg being what the public see as the finished product, the structure underneath being all the marketing work previously established, in order to make the campaign a success.
With every brand name there is a level of association. With these established associations come the sets of cultural meanings and values. These can be seen as a ‘system of signs’ (Hackley, 2005:57), which the audience can then decode. Alternatively, they can be less subtle and simply differentiate themselves as a brand name with a memorable personality and concept. Through branding, the advertiser can emphasise how desirable the product is to the consumer, marketing on the other hand, emphasises the benefit, rather than the qualities of a brand.
‘Through creative ingenuity and careful targeting advertising can support many different kinds of marketing objective’. (Hackley, 2005:66) Using Frizzel car insurance and the Army recruitment campaign as examples, this section will discuss segmentation as both advertising and marketing tool.
Segmentation is a device used to ensure that any kind of advertising campaign is cost-effective. It ensures this by reducing the misdirected money placed in marketing to the wrong people. Market research has to be done in order for the company to know exactly whom they want to attract. In an effective ad campaign the quality of applicants/consumers will be affected by the point of view and objectives coded in the psychological and metaphorical meanings in the ads.
The Frizzel ad campaign evokes nostalgia and notions of escapism in order to segment the company’s desired consumers by helping them to relate to personal experiences where they may have consumed the product. The Army recruitment campaign however, relies on the idea of survival of the fittest. This new generation of problem solving ads have become a ‘response to the needs of segmentation’ (Hackley, 2005:68). Segmentation allows the consumer to decide which products they want to consume but the advertising agency still has the power to decide which kind of people they want to attract, or persuade to use their products; this can have both positive and negative effects.
New products will often make or break the market within the first year, so they need to have impact and vision. Advertising campaigns incorporate all media and new media forms including: the press, radio, television, outdoor advertising, direct marketing, point of sale and the Internet. They do this in order to saturate the market with the notion that their product is superior to all others.
The Orange phone ad campaign is a good example of a product succeeding to great lengths in the highly competitive and booming mobile network trade. Orange launched a series of intuitive and compelling adverts that provided a vision for the future, ‘free from wires’. Marketing experts invest millions into advertising campaigns and if they succeed, they receive the money invested in the ad campaign as a return, ‘advertising generated 61,000 new connections to the Orange mobile phone network, representing a financial return of more than four times that of ad expenditure’ (Hackley, 2005:69).
When there is no brand awareness whatsoever, it is necessary to establish the product as high quality and reliable, as people often rely on previously established brands and companies that they recognise as consumers. Daewoo provides a good example of how an automobile manufacturer can prove more successful than worldlier renowned, established car companies such as Hyundai. The advertising campaign from Daewoo employed superiority tactics by demonstrating the inferiority of other products in the same market, as well as a catchy tagline ‘That’ll be the Daewoo’. Daewoo provides us with evidence that in order to succeed you must make the product’s ‘sub-text that consumption (of the product) […] is exciting, fun and important’ (Hackley, 2005:57).
Repositioning is another marketing technique used in order to attract new consumers to an already established product. For example, Hackley uses the idea that the consumption of Mars Bars used to be a private pleasure, but after a repositioning campaign, it was given different connotations and alternative ways to consume the product. The slogan ‘A Mars a day, helps you work, rest and play’ employs the alternative consumptive techniques used in both marketing and advertising. Many products ‘teach’ you how to use them through advertising whereas the Mars Bar ad campaign allows you to speculate how you (as a consumer) will decide to consume the product yourself.
In conclusion, advertising can be used as a strategic marketing tool and as a persuasive mechanism for consumption, however, without the market research, and statistics the advertisements could easily be misdirected and therefore a failure. In the world of consumption and production, marketing and advertising couldn’t survive without each other.