Advertisement Strategy & Right Medium Selection

This one is tough, demands a lot of mental effort, I agree! But hey may be you just think like those others “orthodox marketing strategists” who always do things by the book. But like I always say “no by the book here” but “out of the book/box”, because this is my weblog policy ;p

By the book is great & most of the time safe but when it comes to marketing and especially to advertising and all that, it’s better to leave the book.

So let’s leave book and be creative, let’s start with advertisement strategy, effective advertisement strategy is depended on three things. (Bare with me!, I will go to the “advertising medium selection (tv, print, newspaper, social media, internet, cable network etc)” but first let me just get done with the advertisement strategy (winks!) )

Your advertisement strategy has three components or parts. The last of which is selection of "effective advertising medium"

1.      Quality Product/Service

2.      Effective Advertising

3.      Effective Medium

Let’s start with quality product/service

Quality Product/Service

Quality product/service well yeah!, that’s true without having quality product/service nothing will work even if you hire pro’s from WPP, Publicis Omnicom Group. 

So the problem is how to get that super quality product/service, well click on it if you want to know. That post will surely help you getting a lot closer to that “Quality Product/Service”. Once you get done with quality it’s time to move to next one, that is “Effective Advertising”.

Effective Advertising

Like having effective visual ads, print ads etc. Well so far I have worked on these two major mediums along with explanation of world top 5 brands advertisements. Check these out to know what I mean by effective advertising.

Effective Medium

Okay! Now let’s talk about the “effective medium”, talking about it is reasonable, isn’t it?! I mean once you have a quality product/service with effective ads next thing is to find that “effective medium” to deliver your message effectively to your target market, right?!, yes!

So far we have covered the two basic components of an effective advertisement strategy, number one quality product/service, number two effective ads for different mediums. 

Now it’s time to decide which medium or mediums would be effective for the aforementioned two components to achieve effective advertising.

Now for that you have to "analyze involvement".

Analyze Involvement

I have given comprehensive explanation of involvement framework in my recent post “Increasing Customer Involvement in Product/Service”. That framework cannot only be used for increasing customer involvement in your product/service but also for measuring involvement in any other product/service.

Read that post if you want to gain detailed understanding of “Customer involvement in Product/Service” I am going to just use the involvement framework from that post over here.

According to Houston & Rothchild (1978) Consumer involvement framework (CIF) ⁽¹⁾ customers take interest in any product/service mainly for three reasons or customer involvement can be broken down into three types.

1.      Enduring Involvement (EI)

2.      Situational Involvement (SI)

3.      Response Involvement (RI)

You guys might be wondering why I am using CIF (which is used for measuring customer involvement in product/service) for advertising medium selection, well it is simple advertising medium like TV, Radio, Newspaper etc too are products/services just like any other product/service.

Okay now let’s move to gaining insights (To understand what Enduring Involvement, Situational Involvement, Response Involvement means read that post I mentioned above).

Gain Insights from EI, SI, RI

Gaining insights from EI, SI, RI means researching your target market in terms of medium involvement and understanding what kind or type of involvement (EI, SI, RI) they have with that advertising medium.

Analyze if any of those involvements types can be effectively utilized, connected to your brand, product/service etc.

If there is a medium which has a type of involvement from your target market that can be effectively utilized, connected with your brand, product/service, then that is your “effective medium”.

For instance Enduring Involvement Medium would be the best medium to use (for your advertisement strategy) as it would mean that your target market has trust and they care about that medium.

Thus if that medium for instance is media, more specifically a news channel, it would mean that your target market love that particular news channel, spends lots of time on watching that news channel and hence your brand, product/service will have more exposure to your target market through that medium.

Similarly if your target market has situational involvement with a medium, that would mean that your target market consider or interact with that medium only when they find themselves in a situation/problem which they need to solve. Such medium is great too but not as much as the previous one but still a good option.

Finally some mediums would have response involvement from your target market; these mediums are actually the advertisement budget black holes.

So avoid investing in such mediums, a good example would be new or old but alien medium for your target market for different reasons (like because of technological gap like utilizing internet medium when your target market has no or limited access etc). 

Similarly new mediums (a TV channel, a web social forum, new sub medium like smart phone advertising so on and so forth) are bad candidates when it comes to effective advertisement strategy, as your target market/customers themselves aren’t sure what the medium is really about (and so they are collecting more information about the medium and are involved in mental processing of that information to understand the type, attributes, benefits, features etc of the medium).

In a Nutshell

The whole analysis will give you a clear picture of your target market in terms of their perceptions, behavior, involvement so on and so forth with different mediums. 

Select the best mediums and you know the drill.. don’t you?! ;)

That’s it, over to you guys, share your ideas, comments box is just under ;)

References:

1.      Houston, M.J. & Rothschild, M.L. (1978) Conceptual and methodological perspectives in involvement. In Research Frontiers in Marketing:Dialogues and Directions (ed. by S.C. Jain), pp. 184–187. American Marketing Association, Chicago, IL.