Question

What is the difference between publicity and advertising? Discuss how they work together to sell a product. Identify a company you are familiar with. Are their publicity tactics effective? Why/why not? Are their advertising campaigns effective? Why/why not? What type(s) of media do they use to promote their product? Provide one suggestion on how they can improve their image through publicity, and one suggestion on how they can improve their advertising campaign.

Answer 1

Answer: Publicity and Advertising are done to achieve the common goal to increase the sales and the major difference between both the activities is the cost. Advertising is done to promote a product or service of the company and it required a lot of money. Advertising are done by the help of various media channels as by using radio, print, television or billboards etc. Advertising will cost a company some thousands of dollars to by the space or time in any media channel. On the other hand publicity is done to attract the media attention. Publicity is about releasing a press release or executing an event which will directly attract the attention of media and it will cost the company very few as comapre to the advertising activity.

Both Advertising and Publicity work together to achieve the common goal of increasing the sale by getting the space in the media, whcih will expose the offering of the company to the customers.

Lets consider TATA as the company, who has done both advertising and publicity and both the activity has gone in favour of TATA. TATA is one of the renowned corporate group in world. A susbsidary of TATA is TATA Steel, which use to release many press release for informing their B2B client. They recently also come up their new advertising campaign on completion of 100 years of TATA Steel where they have communicated " We Also make Tomorrow". This campaign have got lots of eyeball and enhanced the great Brand Equity of TATA Steel as a brand. In this campaign TATA steel has used Print, Digital and TV commercial to reach out to every potential customer.

TATA Steel don't use to advertise a lot due to it presence more in B2B market, but the steel is something which everyone have to use during building of houses and if a Brand can build that confidenece with all the potential customers it will be create huge brand equity for TATA Steel. TATA steel should regularly do the TV commerical, whcih have higer effectiveness this will increase the brand recall and TOMA for TATA Steel.