Question

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Like all institutions, Queens College uses advertising to get students to apply. What type of advertising scheduling would you recommend for Queens College? Justify your answer.

Answer 1

For the purposes of advertising and promotion, a marketer needs to choose from a variety of media available today to promote the messages and to present the business offering to the target market segment. These media types may include press, television, radio, cinema, internet advertising, and mobile advertising among other channels. The media messages need to be scheduled as well so that they create a favorable impact, are more memorable, and may provide for cost effectiveness. The pattern in which an advertising campaign is timed is termed as scheduling. In an yearly flowchart, scheduling may also be represented as slots, which may coincide with the most favorable sales periods. The three important kinds of scheduling models include continuity, flighting, and pulsing.

Continuity- this model is used for only some seasonal products and primarily for the non-seasonal products. As the name suggests, the campaigns run steadily throughout the campaign period. The pattern of advertising suits the packaged goods and services, which may need continuous reinforcement to capture the minds of the audience.

Flighting- the flighting model of advertising scheduling symbolize irregular and intermittent periods of advertising, which may also be alternated with short periods where no advertising is undertaken. The model may hold good for certain product categories including Halloween costumes which have a heavy seasonal demand but no demand otherwise. However a comprehensive range of media channels can be used during this short stint of advertising, which includes a series of commercials.

Pulsing- this hybrid approach may have characteristics of both continuous as well as flighting scheduling. Low advertising levels of campaigns are carried out throughout the year while heavy advertising is undertaken during the peak times. For instance, products like under-arm deodorants may be needed by the consumers throughout the year and even more during the summer months.

The Best Advertising Scheduling For Queen’s College Is A Combinational Approach

Advertisements play an important role and help education institutions to reach to students of different sectors. The four major categories of advertisement used by institutions including Queen’s College include:

1. entertainment media advertisements

2. online advertisements

3. flyers, and

4. advertisement boards.

The different advertisement types may help a college reach out to different customer segments, and create varying impacts for the colleges which may have their own grade and degree of reputation and standards. There is hence a need to have different kinds of advertising scheduling approaches for these different kinds of advertisement messages for the different levels of colleges. For college and education institution like the Queen’s College that may be placed under the good or excellent category:

-online advertisements will create a more sustained impact and advertising scheduling should be pulsing for these kinds of advertisements. Therefore heavy emphasis on online advertisements should be given during the peak seasons and admission times while lower advertisement level should be maintained throughout the year on the different digital platforms.

-entertainment media advertisements only create a partial impact. The same can be said about the flyers and advertisement boards. Hence the advertisement scheduling for these three categories of advertising messages should be flighting. Maximum engagement of these media channels should only be undertaken during the peak seasons and during the admission times of the year, which will reduce wastes and may create a definitive sway.