Challenges of Advertising

Unlike a lot of other marketing tools, advertising allows you to talk to many people very quickly. And provided that message is something people need or want to hear, it can change their lives or make them feel better about themselves. It’s an immediate medium. The problem is there are many people who have used the medium to create an instant relationship with consumers and have failed to deliver on the promises – they’ve lied about the benefits. The result is a cynical consumer whose trust has been broken and whose faith in advertising has become jaded. Ultimately, brands are about trust.

It has gotten more difficult to establish a brand because there are so many more brands vying for attention. The number of companies vying for consumer attention is extraordinary. The stakes are extraordinary. You once could fit in the supermarket, in one-tenth the space, all the brands out there. Now these huge super-supermarkets are creating more choices. How do you inform consumers about which choices are right for them, and how do you connect with the consumer, and where? The products themselves have expanded and the competition has expanded – and the competition for actually finding a client or a consumer has expanded. So the establishment of a brand becomes more and more difficult.

Assessing risk is another challenge. It’s difficult to forecast the success of advertising because you really can’t tell what’s going to work and what isn’t. But you can use some techniques and some research to gain insight. Those companies willing to take risks are the companies more easily able to separate themselves from the competition. Because if you do what everyone else is doing, what is expected, what has been historically proven to work, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to differentiate yourself. So there are risk-adverse companies, and there are companies that embrace risk, some who’ve been able to break through and create something extraordinary, such as Phil Knight and the way he has built the Nike brand.

Measuring the return on your advertising investment is a challenge, but there are a number of ways it can be done. One of them is a brand awareness study and what comes to the consumer’s mind when the brand is first mentioned. If the purpose of the advertising is either to inform or change then it’s critical to know what you’re trying to accomplish. You determine what success should look like in advance and then determine what people are thinking, then return to the initial stages and you do the research again.

However, it’s beneficial to evaluate it with the understanding of what your definition of success is and why you’re investing that money. Is it to increase sales? Is it just to let people know that the brand exists? There are many different ways of defining a successful campaign, but before you begin investing in a campaign, it’s good to know how you’re going to measure the success. So, you sit down with the client before doing any work and gain a clear understanding of what they’re hoping to accomplish.