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Every day when we watch TV or read the newspaper, we come across advertisements. Advertising persuades people to buy a certain product. It brings goods to the attention of consumers.
People who are concerned with marketing deal with:
1. Market research
2. Product development
3. Promotion
1. MARKET RESEARCH
The main idea of market research is, to find out whether a product is needed, whether people would buy it and what kind of people that are. These people are called TARGET GROUP.
Market research is often carried out buy specialist organisations, they make market surveys and customer tests to find out preferences in design, quality, colour and taste. This information is used to decide whether to produce a product, how much it should cost and how it should be promoted.
2. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
There are two ways of product development. On the one hand the product-oriented companies and on the other hand the market-oriented companies.
Product-oriented companies invest a lot of money and time in finding new or im-proved goods to sell them on the market. This is a very risky form of product development, because companies might not sell the new goods. So they lost a lot of money.
Market-oriented companies want to find out what is needed and then they try to develop new ways of production or new goods.
3. PROMOTION
Promotion is very important because however good a product is, it will not find any buyers, if no one knows about it.
If you want to sell a specialised product, all you have to do is to write to people or companies, which are known to be interested or place an advertisement in a trade magazine. If you are not able to do this yourself, you can instruct an advertising argency. They have the experts who can make a successful campaign. They know how, when and where the message should be transmitted to reach most people of the target group.
At the beginning of production, advertising will inform you what a product is like, where you can get it and how much it costs. Later, it is necessary to persuade the people to keep on buying or attract new customers to buy. Modern advertising uses language, pictures, sound and colours to sell the products as well as possible.
ADVERTISING MEDIA
The best times for commercials are the times at which people wait for something special like the news or sports. At these times advertising can be very successful, but it is also very expensive.
TV-COMMERCIALS
TV is one of the most powerful advertising medium, because you can get very detailed information about a product. Depending on your target group you have to decide the time, when your spot shall be shown. It is not useful broadcasting an ad about cars in the children's programmes because this is not your target group, they cannot buy a car.
In the afternoon there are many films on TV, which are interrupted regularly. At that time advertising can be very expensive. In fact, TV-adverts have a strange impact. You might have noticed how well you can remember slogans long after the spot is over.
PRINTED ADVERTISING
The prices for full-page-adverts in national newspapers are roughly the same as for TV spots, but you can also place smaller adverts in the print media. In local newspapers you only pay a few pounds.
The problem of adverts in newspapers and magazines is, that they can attract the reader's eyes only. This problem can be solved by considering several factors:
. Only use right-hand pages for newspaper adverts, because you first look at the right side.
. The colour is an important fact. Red signals mean danger and colours of the dusk make us feel comfortable and save.
. The layout and the text are also very important parts of newspaper adverts. The layout may take the readers look at the main information, and the text is just to inform interested people.
DIRECT MAILING
Direct mailing is another form of advertising. The companies get a list of names and addresses an send leaflets to those people who might be interested in their products. Some people find this direct mailing irritating, wasteful and unsightly, so the leaflets land in the rubbish bin.
PRO AND CONTRAS
Some people say, that advertising persuade people to buy things they don't need and to be wasteful, but advertising also means creating more jobs.
Regardless whether we like advertisements or not, advertising has become indispensable in our economies. It has become a market of its own and it offers a high number of jobs. Moreover, advertisements are an important source of information for the public.
And there is something that we should not forget: Advertising enables us to afford such "luxuries" like TV and newspapers, because without it, they would be considerably more expensive.
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