effective marketing strategies advertising vs public relations
Effective Marketing Strategies: Advertising vs. Public Relations
Marketing, which includes advertising and public relations among other strategies, can extensively influence the success of an organization. This article aims to familiarize the reader with the terms of advertising and public relations individually, and then discusses advertising vs. public relations.
- Informative Advertising: This includes advertisements that aim to provide the customer with information about the product. This form of advertisement informs the customer about the various features and the benefits of using the product.
- Persuasive Advertising: The objective of this form of advertisements is to persuade the consumer to buy a particular product or employ a service offered. It usually includes some attractive additional features or special offers that will further entice the customer to buy a product.
- Comparative Advertising: These types of advertisements, indirectly or directly, compare the product to be marketed with another of a similar type. Generally, when there are only a few (usually, two) major players in the market, one or all of these business competitors use this advertising strategy.
- Rememorative Advertising: Advertising done through this type is usually in case of a product that is well-established and has a strong-hold on the market. This type of advertising is used only to remind the consumer about the product.
- Growth Phase: The function of advertising assumes immense importance at the onset or launch of a product. The advertising is usually in full swing in this phase. All the advertising techniques are put to use in this stage. Initially, informative advertising is employed. In the latter part of this phase, informative as well as persuasive advertising is utilized.
- Established Phase: Once the product has established a standing in the market, a combination of persuasive, comparative, and rememorative advertising is observed with informative advertising kept at its lowest.
- Declining Phase: In this phase, the whole process of advertising is suppressed. Rememorative advertising may be used in isolated cases. If there exists any chance of revival of the product, a novel advertising approach may be applied.
- To generate awareness about a product or a service offered.
- To inform the consumer about the various features of the product or service.
- To induce the customer to buy the product or avail the services offered.
- Repetition of advertisements
- Strategic placement of advertisements (including time)
- Target market considerations and segmentation while advertising
- Quality of advertisements
- Form of advertising
- News
- Speeches
- Special Events
- Written Material
- Audiovisual Material
- Corporate Identity Material
- Other (social cause, websites, employees)
- Growth Phase: As in the case of advertising, public relations in the growth phase is of utmost importance for the organization and considerable time and effort is deployed for public relations.
- Established and Growing Phase: It has been observed that most companies do not entail much importance to public relations once the product is past its growth stage. However, PR deals with the image of the organization on the whole and is not limited to a particular product. Hence, ideally, PR should have a graph that doesn't fall below a minimum predefined value. The PR strategy should be attributed a predetermined level of importance throughout the lifetime of an organization, and a spike should be observed with an increase in PR activities when any new product is launched.
- Maintaining a rapport with the public
- Generating repeat buyers
- Maintaining long-term relationships with the clients
- Giving enough importance to PR.
- Planning and organizing PR activities.
- Significant social work or assistance to social causes.
- Introducing every change in top-level management through news and talk-shows.