Chapter 5: 5.6: What are the advertising campaign parameters that should be considered?

Advertising Campaign Parameters

-Advertising goals -Media selection -Tagline -Consistency -Positioning -Campaign duration

Taglines Used by Various Brands

-American Express "Don't leave home without it." -Avis "We try harder." -Bounty "The quicker picker-upper." -Capital One "What's in your wallet?" -CNN "The most trusted name in news" -Energizer "It keeps going, and going, and going." -Hallmark "When you care enough to send the best." -John Deere "Nothing runs like a Deer." -Maxwell House "Good to the last drop." -Nokia "Connecting people" -Office Depot "Taking care of business." -Target "Expect more. Pay less." -UPS "What can Brown do for you?" -Wal-Mart "Save money. Live better."

Provide Information

Advertising achieves other goals, such as providing information to both consumers and business buyers. Typical information for consumers includes a retailer's store hours, business location, or sometimes more detailed product specifications. Information may make the purchasing process appear to be simple and convenient, which can entice customers to travel to the store to finalize a purchase.

Advertising Goals

Advertising goals are derived from the firm's overall communication objectives. Identifies the most common advertising goals. These should be consistent with the marketing communications objectives and other components of the integrated marketing communications plan. -To build brand awareness -To inform -To persuade -To support other marketing efforts -To encourage action

Positioning

Maintaining consistent product positioning throughout a product's life makes it more likely that a consumer will place the product in a cognitive map. When the firm emphasizes quality in every advertisement, it becomes easier to tie the product into the consumer's cognitive map than if the firm stresses quality in one ad, price in another, and convenience in a third campaign. Inconsistency in positioning makes the brand and company more difficult to remember. Consistent positioning avoids ambiguity; the message stays clear and understandable.

Consistency

Repeatedly seeing a specific visual image, headline, copy, or tagline helps to embed a brand into a person's long-term memory. Visual consistency becomes especially important because most customers spend very little time viewing an advertisement. In most cases, an individual gives just a casual glance at a print advertisement or cursory attention to a television commercial. Visual consistency leads the viewer and moves the message from short-term to long-term memory. Consistent logos, taglines, headlines, and campaigns aid in this process.

Producing effective advertising campaigns...

Requires the joint efforts of the account executive, creative, account planner, and media planner. Working independently might produce some award-winning ads, but often does not achieve the client's objectives. Advertising agencies seek to produce campaigns that stand out among the competing messages. Creating effective campaigns requires attention to the advertising campaign parameters.

Build Brand Awareness

A strong global brand often constitutes a key advertising goal, especially for larger companies. Building a brand's image begins with developing brand awareness. Brand awareness means the consumers recognize and remember a particular brand or company name as they consider purchasing options. Advertising offers an excellent venue to increase brand awareness.

Variability Theory

A theory that suggests variable encoding will be more effective as consumers view advertisements in differing environments. These varied environments increase recall and effectiveness by encoding the message into the brain through various methods. Creatives can generate the effect by varying the situational context of a particular ad. For example, Capital One campaigns use various settings to convey the same basic message, "What's in your wallet?" Changing the context of the ad increases recall and offers an effective method for overcoming competitive ad interference.

Supporting Marketing Efforts

Advertising often supports other marketing functions. Manufacturers use advertising to accompany trade and consumer promotions, such as theme packaging or combination offers. Contests such as the McDonald's Monopoly game require additional advertising to be effective. Retailers also advertise to support marketing programs. Any type of special sale (white sale, buy-one-get-one-free, pre-Christmas sale) requires effective advertising to attract customers. Manufacturers and retail outlets both run advertisements in conjunction with coupons or other special offers. The advertisement in this section for Wholly Guacamole features a brand alliance with Disney along with a coupon on any Wholly product, plus a rebate for Disney's The Lion King movie.

Encouraging Action

Many firms set behavioral goals for advertising programs. A television commercial encouraging viewers to take action by dialing a toll-free number to make a quick purchase serves as an example. Everything from ShamWow to Snuggies has been sold using action tactics. Infomercials and home shopping network programs rely heavily on immediate consumer purchasing responses. Action-oriented advertising takes place in the business-to-business sector. Generating leads becomes the primary goal. Many business advertisements provide web addresses or telephone numbers so that buyers can request more information or make a purchase. The five advertising goals of building image, providing information, being persuasive, supporting other marketing efforts, and encouraging action are not separate from each other. They work together in key ways. For instance, awareness and information are part of persuasion. The key is to emphasize one goal without forgetting the others.

Media Selection

Selecting the appropriate media requires an understanding of the media usage habits of the target market and then matching that information with the profile of each medium's audience. Volkswagen positioned the Tiguan crossover as a fun vehicle aimed at young, active individuals who love the outdoors. Although the campaign featured television commercials, the more unusual component of the campaign was the outdoor segment. The theme "people want an SUV that parks well with others" was featured in a series of outdoor ads placed at bike racks and trail heads at 150 national parks and resorts. Brian Martin, CEO of Brand Connections Active Outdoor, which placed the ads, noted that more than 30 million impressions were made with hikers, bikers, and other outdoor lovers. The marketing team identifies the media the target market favors. Teenagers surf the web and watch television. Only a small percentage reads newspapers and news magazines. Various market segments exhibit differences in when and how they view various media. Older African Americans watch television programs in patterns that differ from those of older Caucasians. Males watch more sports programs than females, and so forth.

Taglines

The key phrase in an advertisement, the __________, should be something memorable that identifies the uniqueness of a brand or conveys some type of special meaning. "Just Do It" has been Nike's tagline for many years. Taglines provide consistency across various advertising platforms. Consumers often remember taglines and identify them with specific brands. A catchy tagline identifies a brand and then stays with it over successive campaigns. In order to bring freshness to a campaign, company marketers may tweak or modify a tagline every few years. With shorter attention spans, taglines have been shrinking from short sentences to just two or three words.

Campaign Duration

The length or duration of a campaign should be identified. Using the same advertisement for an appropriate period of time allows the message to embed in the consumer's long-term memory. It should be changed before it becomes stale and viewers lose interest; however, changing ads too frequently impedes retention. Creating new campaigns also increases costs. Typical campaigns last about six months; however, exceptions do occur. Some run for years. The criterion that typically determines when it is time to change a campaign is the wear-out effect. When consumers ignore ads and it no longer is producing results, it becomes time to launch a new campaign. One method used by advertisers to lengthen advertising campaigns and delay wear-out effects is to create multiple versions of ads within the campaign, as was the case in the JD Bank ads that used variability theory.

Top Choice

The term ______________ suggests what the term implies: A top choice brand is the first or second pick when a consumer reviews her evoked set of possible purchasing alternatives. Many products become top of mind or top choice due to brand equity. Advertising can strengthen brand equity.

Successful brands possess two characteristics:

The top of mind and the consumer's top choice.

Persuasion

When an ad convinces consumers of a brand's superiority, persuasion has taken place. Changing consumer attitudes and convincing them to consider a new purchasing choice can be challenging. Advertisers utilize several persuasion methods. One involves showing consumers the negative consequences of failing to buy a particular brand. Alternatively, an advertising campaign can highlight the superior attributes or benefits of a brand.

Top of Mind

When consumers are asked to identify brands that quickly come to mind from a product category, one or two particular brands are nearly always mentioned. These names are the _________________ brands. For example, when asked to identify fast-food hamburger restaurants, McDonald's and Burger King almost always head the list. The same may be true for Nike and Reebok for athletic shoes in the United States, as well as in many other countries.