Watch any given television long enough, and you’ll be greeted by advertisements. And in today’s ever-competitive market, the real story is behind the scenes, where companies face a constant battle to stay ahead of the competition. And with brand names offering hugely lucrative contracts for the right image, the art of advertising today is massively important.
The actual art of advertising and branding is a lot more sophisticated and in-depth than the consumers they target may realize. Long before an advert even reaches the screen, or print, it has been subject to pain-staking research, focus groups, marketing surveys, and many other methods of determining the current state of the target market. Without this information, releasing a product runs the risk of commercial suicide if the consumer isn’t ready. There’s no such thing as luck where advertising a brand, either established or new, is involved. It takes a lot of hard work, grueling hours in meetings and highly skilled teams of creative minds to finalize a concept.
Part of this process, and a way of determining whether a new brand and accompanying advertisement has succeeded or not, is actually one of the simplest. By providing a group of consumers with either an image, a tag line, or even just a combination of colors and sounds, and they recognize the brand behind the advertising, then the hard work has paid off.
This is where the advertising and branding of a product is so important, by firstly ensuring that consumers will recognize a given product or brand. The next important factor is actually persuading consumers to associate certain attributes with your product. These can range from reliability, pricing, value for money, etc. This is one of the most difficult, yet most intrinsically important sources of advertising and branding success. An instance of this is if you mentioned mouthwash – is there a brand that springs to mind immediately? How about favourite destinations to go on vacation – does one resort receive more recommendations than others? Even if that particular resort hasn’t been visited by everyone who mentioned it, just the fact the advertising of that resort makes it sound so enticing that they perceive it’s the destination they should go to, is a sure sign of successful brand advertising.
Yet if successfully advertising a brand is difficult enough to begin with, it can be even more so trying to reach out to new markets with the same product. The stronger the brand and the more successful the initial advertising campaign, the more difficult it becomes to find new avenues. Despite possibly having the number one product on the market, any new advertising still needs to go through the whole process again from scratch. After all, what worked for one product is not guaranteed to work for another.
And this is where the true power of advertising and branding becomes apparent, and is the strongest proof yet that it’s one of the most important in determining whether a company succeeds or fails.