The Medium And The Message: Advertising And Marketing For Business

Looking at both the terms of marketing and advertising, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they are the same thing. In order to market your product properly, you need to advertise effectively. And in this, they are intertwined. Having the right marketing strategy for your product or business is a way to really bolster your product. It’s not just the marketing tactics that it should contain, but rather the components that make it include current trends in technology, a collection of what platforms are best to promote yourself on, creating the best tools or resources and creating content which is the most appropriate. The marketing plan is your manifesto and where your ideas have been agonized over and are now solidified in this strategy. And once that has been covered, you can go on to create the advertising. There are two ways in which you can communicate to a customer via the medium of advertising effectively.

Being Emotional

Essentially, going for the jugular. We build our lives on relationships, with people, pets, even ourselves. Advertising is at its most effective when it is going for the emotions in people in a sincere fashion. And this is something that works very well to set you apart from the crowd of other advertisers. Style over substance has been the name of the game for so long that going the other way is just basic business sense! As consumers, we are subject to 362 ads per day (excluding any exposure to brands) and out of those 362, we consume only 3%. It is very likely that the ads you remember are the ones that got a response out of you. A trick to remembering something is to make it important or essential, and if it makes you feel something, that will connect more with your body and mind over visual popcorn. Drink driving campaigns over Christmas provide an emotional punch because they show the consequences. Coca-cola has tied in the frustration of the designated driver to offer them a free drink.

There are many schools of thought about the emotional response in ads, and the Spinweb marketing radio podcast have an episode about marketing that is worth listening to if you want to get more information.

The Improvement Factor

Namely, how will the product improve my life by simply being in it? Many ads like to show the business side of things, but consumers don’t care about that, it’s just the product they are after. So you need to make them wonder how they even survived without it before! This is why car commercials are very good in this area, the product is presented in a dynamic way, and it easily oozes coolness because it is driving across ice or away from an earthquake. The car is showing you what it can do when pushed to the limits, and therefore it becomes “essential” to you.

The two factors in getting a product to a customer are the right marketing and the perfect ad or commercial, and it truly shows that the two cannot function individually, but rather make a case for a very strong partnership in business.