In my book How Advertising Works (Advertising Association, 1992), I ended with a number of conclusions about the nature of advertising. I think these still hold true, and a brief restatement of some of them may be a good introduction to this chapter.

The sheer variety of advertising means that it will always be an art rather than a science and that generalisation is dangerous. It is worth keeping this in mind whenever we think about advertising. That said, advertising (as distinct from other marketing actions) does have some distinguishing features, which give it a special place.

First, advertising works within economics, not against it. It cannot swim against the tide of a market. In the West especially, there are many markets which have reached the limit of their development: advertising can do nothing to expand these. Individual consumers do not do things they do not otherwise want to do, purely as the result of advertising.

Colin

● To distinguish advertising from other elements of the marketing communications mix ● To emphasise advertising’s use of the mass media ● To consider the main value of advertising ● To present arguments about how advertising is said to work ● To illustrate different types of advertisements ● To offer suggestions on how to produce effective advertisement

● applicability to non-FMCG product areas;
● long-term versus short-term effects;
● consistency and comprehensiveness of information – when submitting information on marketing communications budgets, how consistent and comprehensive were the companies data?
● applicability to different market situations, e.g. small markets, niche markets, operating with very small market shares;
● consideration of market growth – to what extent does zero growth or rates of growth/decline affect the situation?
● how should a concentrated or fragmented market be defined?

● Advertising impacts on customer value through its effect on perceived quality thus increasing profitability.
● It is how the money is spent that matters – not how much more is spent than competitors.
● The nature and content of advertisements really do matter – focusing on how product image or company reputation affects the customer’s perception of quality and therefore value.

● The cumulative effect of the use of many promotional activities over a single time frame.
● The impact of previous promotions and prevailing market perceptions.
● Competitive activity.
● Consumers/customers’ own varied (idiosyncratic and inconsistent) behavioural responses to promotional activity.
● Time delays between promotional activity and subsequent behavioural responses.
● Non-controllable, exogenous variables occurring at the time of the promotional activity, for example, economic fluctuations, distributor activity, price variations, import and export behaviour.
● The difficulty in measuring individual promotional effects accurately and adequately.
● While measuring outcomes (what happened) may be possible, this does not explain how or why they happened.
● The role performed by advertising varies from one case to another. Advertising is likely to work differently if the aims of a campaign are to create favourable impressions compared with a campaign aimed at generating sales response.