Essay/Term paper: Why launch an advertising campaign

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Economics

Why Launch An Advertising Campaign

To start off, when your company is just becoming established in the British
market, consumers will have no knowledge of your product, we must encourage or
persuade the consumer to buy your product. To make customers aware of the
product we must advertise. Large scale advertising mainly consists of
advertising on TV, Radio, newspapers and other large scale media. This ensures
that advertising reaches the largest amount of people in the shortest amount of
time. It is likely that the consumer will be more interested in the product if
they hear of on a national level such as TV or Radio. We must watch out for
other companies in Britain that sell a similar product or overseas companies
that sell in Britain so Pakanawa can analyse the British marketing strategy and
improve upon it. Market Segmentation is also another factor to take notice of.
Market segmentation helps to differentiate products for different age groups.
For most product, there are segments of the market that you need to specifically
advertise to. Fore example, different methods of advertising would be needed if
you were to advertise to parents than to the children. For a lot of products
their are a lot of age groups that you need to advertise for and these must be
taken into consideration. We must analyse the different market segments that are
applicable to Pakanawa and investigate how we can exploit these different
market segments. An ad campaign is a very sensible idea because no-one will know
about our products without the use of advertising. This means that we must
concentrate on a good ad campaign so people will know about our products.
Approximate prices are shown below for large scale advertising:

TV Price agreed with company (500,000 + ) Radio
(250,000 + ) Newspaper lineage ad 250 Newspaper
full page 700-900 Cinema booklets 650.00 per cinema Flyers
0.08 per flyer

As is shown above, advertising is very expensive when done on a large scale so
to justify any form of large scale advertising it must be proven to be effective.
At Pakanawa™ we must consider all angles of the media and come to a conclusion
about advertising.

What sort of advertising should you use?

By far the most far reaching of these strategies is Television advertising. A
large amount of people watch TV and this type of advertising will reach many
social groups. Although this type of advertising is very expensive and even more
so during peak times, TV advertising should be seen by the masses and
encouraging a lot of new customers, so in time, TV advertising will pay for
itself. This will prove to be a very effective form of advertising media and
should be adopted in the Pakanawa situation. To boost sales even more, and to
prolong the life of the Pakanawa product line, another form of advertising
should be taken aboard. Newspaper advertising would also be a good idea.
Newspaper advertising would reach another section of the consumer market and
would also be very effective in the right context. A full page newspaper advert
is a lot of money but would bring in a lot more customers and make many more
people aware of the product. It is important to make people aware of the product
so they will buy it, there are many advantages of the Television over the
newspaper, such as the fact that TV is a captive market and if you can vary the
showing times of the advertisement then you can vary the consumer group that
will be receiving them. A bad point, however, as is with most forms of
advertising, is the delay between seeing the advertisement and buying the
product. There is also a delay similar to this with newspaper advertisements but
the delay is not usually as long as is the one with TV advertising.

Below the line promotion

Below the line promotion refers to advertising that does not rely on large scale
media such as TV or Radio. Forms of this are direct mailing, exhibitions and
trade fairs, sales promotions and product placing. In the case of Pakanawa it
would be sensible to follow some of these ideas but not all of them. For example,
it would not really be a good idea to exhibit the product at a trade fair
without first having a sales promotion or product placing. The only form
mentioned that would not be suitable would be direct mailing, to which the
general public refer to a junk mail. The question arises whether you would mail
the children that are likely to want the product or whether to mail the parents
that would buy the product for their children. If you were to mail the children
then the parents could get very annoyed at the fact that you went directly to
the children instead of through their guardians. Although if you were to mail
the parents there would not be a very large chance that it would also reach the
children, who would be the driving force of the sale of the product. Sales
promotion or endorsements would be a good idea as this would ensure that more
people heard about the product and it would be more appealing if a well known
children's presenter was to endorse the product.

Branding

Multiple product branding would be the best idea for Pakanawa as with multiple
branding the firm is not always known as the same one and with Pakanawa's toys,
the different products under different brands could inhibit the sale of the
other brands. With multiple product branding the company would be recognised as
selling all these products and with a well established market this would benefit
the company although multiple branding has one advantage over this, if the
company has had bad publicity, with the other brands, a knock on effect of the
other products is limited. Therefore, I think that the best form of branding for
Pakanawa's toys would be multiple product branding.

Product Development

We must also consider product development to extend the product life cycle and
retain interest in the series of products produced by Pakanawa. To fully
conduct a product development scheme we must conduct some market research into
the attitudes of the customers and what they think can be done to improve the
products provided by Pakanawa. We must come up with new ideas fairly frequently
and brainstorming should be encouraged. Safety must always be improved on in
Pakanawa products and a team of designers must be considering product
development all of the time.

Merchandising and packaging

Merchandising is an attempt to influence customers at the point of sale. The
point of sale is anywhere that a customer buys a product. Customers are intended
to buy based on what they see rather from a sales assistant. Therefore at
Pakanawa a vital factor in influencing customers is the way in which the items
are displayed. To sell the products effectively we must take into consideration
the effect that the packaging should have on the customers and the way in which
displays of this particular product are arranged. A good idea would be to have a
"space ship' or something similar to encourage people to look and to buy the
product. To influence customers at the point of sale, a number of tactics must
be employed as we must first draw the customers attention to the display and to
the product, and finally, to the price of the product.

Why a sales team?

The job of a sales team is to create interest in the product with the public and
retailers. The overall aim of a sales team is to create the highest level of
distribution of the product and to promote the product so representatives of a
firm are interested in purchasing this product to sell it in their shops. They
should initially aim to start small and encourage interest in the media, the
public and shareholders. The whole image of the company rests on the sales team
as it is their job to promote the product and the company and to stop any bad
press about the company. They should try and convince buyers with market
research that there product will sell and that buying this product is a good
investment. They could offer commission or discounts to firms for bulk buying
and high sales. A sales team should also be allowed full control over the
bartering of the goods and should set there own guidelines within a broad range
of company guidelines.

Legal and Public problems

A few problems may be made of the fact that the product is cuddly yet violent in
its own kind of way, with the image being of a scary bear. Some extremists may
consider this to be unacceptable and may want the bear banned from sale or put
out a campaign against the product. This should easily be solved with a well
briefed PR team that have a capacity to lie. All doubts should be dispelled and
children illustrated playing happily with the bear and there should be no other
legal or PR problems, but it helps to have a well briefed PR team.