Question

Watch the video "Advertising, Sales Promotion, and Public Relations." Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each form of communication. Explain why marketers would choose to use each form within a consumer products promotion. Illustrate your ideas with specific examples.

Answer 1

Strength of Advertising:

a. Introducing a new product in the market: Advertising plays a major role in introducing a new product onto the market. This spurs people to buy the commodity.

b. Expansion in the market: This helps the supplier to further grow its business. This helps to explore new product markets and to preserve existing markets. This plays a sheet anchor role in extending the advertisement for the goods of the manufacturer even by transmitting the customers residing in the distant and remote areas.

c. Promotional promotes the mass production of goods which raises sales volume. In other words, with each increase in sales, sales can be increased with extra promotional spending, and marketing expenses should decrease.

Disadvantages of Advertising;

a. Encourages sale of inferior product: Each producer projects its product as a superior one. Accordingly, the consumer can not determine which product is really fine. Consequently, even after charging a premium price for it, it is difficult to obtain a good quality product. If a seller gets a good price for some inferior product, it will become with him a habit. It also affects other retailers. So advertising is said to encourage the sale of inferior products.

b. Destroying the social values: For customers, only very few items are of any interest. The creativity of the new products is getting really on their nerves. They want to buy them but they don't have any money at their disposal. Consequently, they start to feel depressed about their current status. Seeing it as a moral evil, advertisements can be said to destroy social values.

c. Certain advertisement leaves a wrong impact on customers: In ads, foul language and inappropriate pictures are often used to attract a certain demographic. They may be an insult to a given class. This causes social ideals to die. The people generally dislike these kinds of ads, as it hurts their feelings. It is said in this relation that certain advertisements are in bad taste.

Advantages of sales promotion;

a. Helps to create awareness of new products - Sales promotion is a highly effective tool for introducing consumers and business partners to new products and for encouraging customers to take action (e.g., sample a product).

b. Strengthens Consumer Involvement and Loyalty - Sales promotion can be the primary mechanism used by companies to communicate with their consumers and eventually build a stronger bond (e.g., give incentives to customers).

c. Used for Supporting Other Promotions - Sales promotion is often used as a supporting function of other promotional methods (e.g., salespeople that offer promotional items to sales prospects).

Disadvantages of sales promotion:

a. Issues With Promotion Clutter - While advertising competes with other advertisements in the same way for the attention of consumers, promotional clutter may also pose a problem with sales promotions (e.g., unnecessary promotion sent by email, postal mail).

b. Can Make Consumers Wait for Promotion - Repetitive use of sales promotion can allow consumers to wait until a product promotion is available before making their next purchase, resulting in the marketer not optimizing the revenue potential of a product (i.e., the consumer will not pay full price).

c. Distributors may not be willing to accept - Many customer-focused sales promotions require distributor assistance (e.g. retailers), but not all distributors can support a consumer sales promotion, particularly if the promotion requires the distributor to do additional work.

Advantages of public relation;

a. Influence-audiences are more likely to trust messages from an objective source than commercial messages paid for. It is one of the most effective advertising types and can be convincing.

b. Reach - There are several news outlets that can pick up a good story, bringing the message to a broad audience.

Disadvantages of public relation;

a. No direct control - Unlike advertisements, you can't exactly influence how the media portrays your brand, when your message appears, and where it will be put.

b. No guaranteed results - You can spend time and money preparing a press release, having appropriate photos and talking to journalists, but you can never guarantee the publication of your story. That can lead to a poor return on investment.

Marketers use advertisement:

Advertisement helps in promoting the product in the market. Goods or services recognition can be built by showcasing the mark's unique features. Nowadays, creating awareness is not just enough because of intense competition, but knowledge of the top of the mind is required. For instance, Pepsi introduced diet Pepsi in the market. As it was a new product the marketers used the technique of advertisement to promote its product in the market. This helped them to promote their brand, to create product awareness and attract more and more customers.

Marketers use sales promotion

In a number of mechanics, promotional deals will come: free samples, discounts, offers, temporary price drops, buy one get one free offer, or free gifts. The system you choose to incorporate is often in accordance with the audience. For instance: Amazon offering coupons and discount vouchers to attract more customers and sales.

Marketers use public relation:

Some of the marketing objectives that PR efforts can achieve include raising awareness, informing and educating, gaining understanding, building confidence, giving consumers a reason to buy, and inspiring customer acceptance. For instance: Flip kart uses the PR strategy to educate its users and build confidence among its customers.