Effective Marketing Strategies: Advertising vs. Public Relations

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as the activities, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

The contribution of marketing to the success of any business is highly significant.

In fact, marketing has the power to determine the success of a particular product or service launched. Effective marketing involves the application of many strategies, two of which are: advertising and public relations.

We shall attempt to understand these two terms in the following discussion. Henceforth, here the use of the term product will refer to both, a service or a product that is to be marketed.

Advertising refers to any form of paid and impersonal presentation of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.

This includes advertisements that aim to provide the customer with information about the product. This form of advertisement informs the customer about the various features and the benefits of using the product.

The objective of this form of advertisements is to persuade the consumer to buy a particular product or employ a service offered. It usually includes some attractive additional features or special offers that will further entice the customer to buy a product.

These types of advertisements, indirectly or directly, compare the product to be marketed with another of a similar type. Generally, when there are only a few (usually, two) major players in the market, one or all of these business competitors use this advertising strategy.

Advertising done through this type is usually in case of a product that is well-established and has a strong-hold on the market. This type of advertising is used only to remind the consumer about the product.

The function of advertising assumes immense importance at the onset or launch of a product. The advertising is usually in full swing in this phase. All the advertising techniques are put to use in this stage. Initially, informative advertising is employed. In the latter part of this phase, informative as well as persuasive advertising is utilized.

Once the product has established a standing in the market, a combination of persuasive, comparative, and rememorative advertising is observed with informative advertising kept at its lowest.

In this phase, the whole process of advertising is suppressed. Rememorative advertising may be used in isolated cases. If there exists any chance of revival of the product, a novel advertising approach may be applied.

• To generate awareness about a product or a service offered.
• To inform the consumer about the various features of the product or service.
• To induce the customer to buy the product or avail the services offered.

• Repetition of advertisements
• Strategic placement of advertisements (including time)
• Quality of advertisements
• Form of advertising

Public relations can also be considered as a planned effort by an organization to the establishment of favorable opinion for the organization and its products and services.

• News
• Written Material
• Audiovisual Material
• Corporate Identity Material

As in the case of advertising, public relations in the growth phase is of utmost importance for the organization and considerable time and effort is deployed for public relations.

It has been observed that most companies do not entail much importance to public relations once the product is past its growth stage. However, PR deals with the image of the organization on the whole and is not limited to a particular product.

Hence, ideally, PR should have a graph that doesn't fall below a minimum predefined value. The PR strategy should be attributed a predetermined level of importance throughout the lifetime of an organization, and a spike should be observed with an increase in PR activities when any new product is launched.

• Maintaining a rapport with the public
• Generating repeat buyers
• Maintaining long-term relationships with the clients

Most organizations and its managers tend to neglect public relations as an effective marketing strategy. Even when employed, PR often is not a well-planned and well-managed activity. It assumes a very random form and this can hurt the prospects of an organization and its products.

The most paramount suggestion when using PR as a marketing strategy is that it should be given its due importance.

• Giving enough importance to PR.

• Significant social work or assistance to social causes.
• Introducing every change in top-level management through news and talk-shows.

Advertising has an extremely wide reach, and thus, is one of the most effective tools of marketing. Additionally, its expressive nature enables it to strongly influence the consumer.

Advertising in itself implies paid ways of generating positivity in the market about a product. As against this, PR deals with building long-term relationships and promoting a positive image of the company. PR relates to the unpaid ways of 'being in news'.

Thus, the cost incurred for the process of advertising is much higher as compared to that required for building strong public relations.

An activity that is a result of public relations like news, gives the product review from the perspective of a third person and also gives a detached comment on the product. Thus, a PR activity is perceived to be more legitimate and believable by the customer.

Both advertising and public relations can be used as tools for branding. It is important to remember that advertising or public relations, alone will never comprise the marketing strategy of an organization for its product. A combination of both is mandatory for effective business marketing and in order to ensure the success of a product.