For our final example in this series I chose an institutional advertisement. Instead of focusing on a product, institutional advertising is focused on the name and prestige of an organization. This can be done for various purposes but is often done to either improve or help establish a particular image for the company. After the Gulf oil spill, British Petroleum put together several institutional advertisements designed to help improve their image. This Always commercial isn’t focused on overcoming an image problem but instead is being used to advocate the cause #LikeAGirl. If you want a longer example, here’s another Always commercial that has the same goal.
Reminder Advertising
Continuing our examples of different types of advertising, this commercial that includes both Doritos and Mountain Dew is a good illustration of a reminder advertisement. When a brand reaches the preference or insistence stage of brand familiarity, reminder advertisements can become useful. These advertisements are there to reinforce previous messages or simply to reinforce the brand image (as is the case here). Both of these commercials introduce a new product (Doritos Blaze and Mountain Dew Ice) but the bulk of each commercial has nothing to do with the new product and is instead built around maintaining their established brand image.
Indirect Competitive Advertising
Here’s another current commercial that illustrates another category of advertisement, indirect competitive advertising. This Progressive commercial focuses on highlighting a product feature – their Home Quote Explorer. Beyond simply showing commercials like this I often ask the class to dissect the commercial and look at what tactics were used to support the message. In this case humor is used to grab and maintain the viewer’s attention, the phrase “it’s easy” is used, and the product description is provided very succinctly (less than 4 seconds) – “you just answer some simple questions online and you get coverage options to choose from”.
Direct Competitive Advertising
Continuing the theme from our last post, our next example will be an example of direct competitive advertising, specifically this fits in the category of comparative advertising. This Blue Buffalo commercial is focused on highlighting the differences between their dog food and that of Iams.
Pioneering Advertising
I’m always on the lookout for current content that can be used to illustrate the concepts discussed in my marketing classes. Students especially enjoy video clips so when I can find commercials or other video clips that fit with class content that feels like a home run. Advertising is often taught at this time in the semester so our next few blog posts will focus on current advertisements that illustrate the various forms of advertising covered in Chapter 15 of Essentials of Marketing.
This post covers pioneering advertising. As we explain in the textbook, pioneering advertising is more focused on creating primary (or category) demand rather than selective demand. This is most applicable in the earliest stages of the product life cycle and helps educate customers about the existence and potential value of a product they might be unaware of. This advertisement for Google Home does a great job of illustrating that concept. It doesn’t talk about advantages versus competing products, instead it focuses on various uses of the product.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »