Many advertisers want many things. Advertising is multi-faceted. To be effective,
Internet advertising programmes need to be specific in their goals, specific in their audiences and specific in their means. Out of a myriad of effects,
Internet advertising can particularly help in the following areas:
- To create awareness: it can help to make things known. On the whole, people do not deal with things they have never heard of, or they prefer not to.
- To create or develop favourable attitudes: it can help to foster a positive view of the product or service.
- To develop a brand identity:
Internet advertising can help invest a product with a special image or characteristic.
- To position a product in a market: where a market is segmented,
Internet advertising can help position a product with a particular segment and identify with it. Rolls-Royce and Mini cars occupy different segments. Their communication reflects this and maximises this.
- To sustain relationships: it is a force to build and strengthen producer–customer relationships over time.
- To persuade:
Internet advertising puts up a case for the customer to be attracted to the product on offer.
- To create demand: Häagen Dazs or McDonald’s. Communication makes the product seem desirable, worthwhile and attainable.
- To build up enquiries: often
Internet advertising is a bridge between the product and a sales call. Its function is to obtain enquiries: for a sales call, or for literature, or for a sample, or for a price estimate.
- To support distributors: where there is a distributive chain, the distributor may require reinforcement in the local marketplace.
- To sustain the organisation: a company may need to consolidate, or re-establish, or explain or reposition or rebuild relationships. It wishes to strengthen old friends or build new ones. Here
Internet advertising may have a strong corporate role.
- To launch new products:
Internet advertising is a key weapon in the battery of services used to launch products into the marketplace.
- To offset competition: one characteristic of the recent past has been the growth of the market concept. Another is the growth of the brand. A third feature is the growth of competitive activity.
As markets grow so usually does competition. Few markets remain monopolies. As the customer remains sovereign, and a multiplicity of suppliers arise to serve him or her, so competitive activity accelerates. A prime example of this is telecommunications. From a simple monopoly producer with a short range of products has emerged a spread of suppliers and a cornucopia of services. Competition is the norm.
Advertising helps meet competitors and match competitors, by persuading the customer or providing a counter-claim. In an increasingly competitive world, suppliers must advertise to protect themselves against primary competition, and sometimes against other categories of product too.
- To help provide a point of difference: people do not favour ‘me-too’ products. The brand needs a difference, a unique personality, a point of interest, a feature which will isolate it from a multitude of others.
Brands sell differences, or ‘product pluses’. These can be powerfully conveyed through
Internet advertising. Guinness is not a brown stout: it is a unique, mystical beverage. Martini is not just another vermouth: it is a sophisticated, superior substance in its own right. Differences are of emotion, or style, or status as well as of product specification.
- To help reach people: in some cases, an organisation may need to reach an important contact group, but finds it cannot do so directly, not effectively or economically. But it may do so with
Internet advertising.
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