Purpose and Goals of Advertising [MAC 325]

PURPOSE AND GOALS OF ADVERTISING

Advertising is just not for information, but for a purpose. This purpose is to motivate a desired action. People use advertising to achieve a variety of objectives.

The broad functions are to inform, educate, and persuade. The subsidiary functions are to create awareness, change attitudes and generally to gain acceptability. In case of product and service advertising, the objective is to inform the consumers and generate demand. Institutional and ideas advertising are designed to create a favorable attitude and acceptability.

Thus, the functions/roles/purposes of advertising are many:

1. Marketing- Marketing is the strategic process in business that is used to satisfy consumer needs and wants through goods and services, to reach its target audiences, marketing use many tools of promotion. Also known as marketing communication, these tools include personal selling, sales promotion, public relations and of course, advertising. Advertising is the most widely used and most visible of promotional tools in marketing.

2. Communication- Advertising is a commercial form of mass communication. It transmits different types of marketing information and tries to match buyers and sellers in the market place. Advertising not only informs prospective buyers, it also transforms the product by creating a personality for it. Using visuals, words, music, drama and lot of other things, advertising creates an image for the product that goes beyond mere facts.

3. Economic role- Advertising play an important role in the economy by helping the society to achieve abundance by informing and persuading people about products, services and goods. Advertising assists in the development of judgment on the part of consumers in their purchase practices. Simply put, advertising helps consumers make informed buyers decisions. Others believe that advertising is a source of information that increases the price sensitivity and stimulates competition. Advertising stimulates economy by providing employments to many people. Newspapers, periodicals and even the electronic media depend on advertising as a major source of revenue.

4. Social role- Advertising plays a number of social roles. It informs us about new and improved products. Sometimes it tells us how to use certain products. It also helps us compare products and services.

5. Improve sales- Advertising can also be for winning back the lost consumers, by announcing some improvements, new schemes, attractive packages, or better quality of the product or services. It might be necessary to reduce prices to hold on the consumers against competition.

6. Provide satisfaction- A consumer buys a product or service for the satisfaction it provides. The interest is not in the product or service for itself, but in the satisfaction it provides. It can be psychological too. If one buys a soap which is advertised as the beauty soap of the stars, one knows very well that one cannot become a film star by using the soap or even acquire the complexion of the film star. The psychological satisfaction is of the self delusion that one uses the same toilet soap as a film star.

7. Sells Lifestyle- Advertising also sells lifestyle. This is very true of the advertisements of such products as pressure cookers or gas stoves. These might be described as conveniences products. Thus, advertising creates demands for the new products and hence creates a lifestyle.

8. Influences Public Opinion-Advertising today has become a very powerful instrument for motivating public opinion and action. That is why it is used for political, social change and other behavioural change campaigns i.e. ‘use of condom’, family planning, etc.