It pays to advertise

(2)

In this unit we follow some of the points raised about the question of advertising. Look at the structure of the text, then read quickly through it and note down the answers to the following questions. Remember that you will not need to understand every word in the text in order to do so:

1. Does the author agree with the slogan in the title?

2. Into what larger concept does advertising fit?

3. What is a branded product?

1. 'It pays to advertise'. This nice simple-minded slogan used to appear on poster sites up and down the country some twenty years ago – with no further explanation. To the poster proprietors who put it on their (empty) sites, it seemed self-evident. Perhaps it does to you.

If you are running a business, it may not be so simple. There are plenty of businesses, in all sectors of the economy, which advertise either very little or, indeed, not at all. You do not see many advertisements for Marks & Spencer, and even fewer for British Home Stores – though, of course, their shop windows are their own ads. The fact is that advertisements are just one of the many tools available to help a firm to sell what it has to offer, and it may well be that advertising is, quite simply, not appropriate for the firm's particular circumstances.

At its simplest, a business buys resources, which can be raw materials, parts and components, the brains and muscles of its employees or even money, turns them into some form of product or service and sells them to its customers at a profit. To do this, it requires working capital, employees, premises, potential customers, and a means of reaching them. This applies pretty well to any kind of business. The process of identifying, reaching and selling to the potentia1 customers is, nowadays, called marketing, which is rather more than just the jumped up name for ‘selling’ that it is sometimes thought to be.

People involved in marketing, who for some reason are often rather defensive about it, spend a great deal of time trying to invent better definitions of their task, in order to make clear to everyone else what it is all about. This is not a very helpful process, as the definitions tend to be ingenious but obscure. Very simply, the idea of marketing is that a business ought, as far as possible, to start with its customers; and it should gear all its efforts to giving the customers what they want – at a profit, of course. This means, for example, that customers should somehow have some say in the design of the product; and that it should be made as easy as possible for the customer to buy.

The process of marketing, then, includes a whole range of activities relating to selling the products – actual selling, decisions on pricing and distribution policy, advertising and other forms of promotion – and, indeed, at least part of the specification of the product. It involves, therefore, the market research and intelligence on which the necessary understanding of the customer must be based. This collection of activities is usually called, in marketing jargon, the 'marketing mix'.