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| As a tool of marketing communications, advertising is the structured and composed, nonpersonal communication of information. It is usually paid for and usually persuasive, about products, services, or ideas, by identified sponsors through various media. Looking at four important dimensions of advertising (communication, marketing, economic, and social) can help us better understand what advertising is and how it has evolved. Because advertising is first and foremost communication, advertisers cannot afford to take the communication process for granted. The basic human communication process begins when one party (the source) formulates an idea, encodes it as a message, and sends it via some channel or medium to another party (the receiver). The receiver must decode the message in order to understand it. To respond, the receiver formulates a new idea, encodes that concept, and then sends a new message back through some channel. A message that acknowledges or responds to the original message is feedback, and it affects the encoding of a new message. In advertising, the communication process is complex because of the multidimensional nature of the source, the message, and the recipient. Traditionally, advertising has been principally a one-way process; but with today's new interactive technology, consumers can give feedback to advertising messages in real time using the same channels as the sender. Marketing's primary role is to attract revenues, so advertising is an important marketing tool. The targets of a firm's marketing will determine the targets of its advertising. There are two major types of audiences marketers address with their advertising: consumers and businesses. Within each of these categories, though, are special forms of advertising, such as retail, trade, professional, and agricultural. Similarly, a firm's marketing mix—or strategy—will establish the type of advertising needed and the skills required to implement it. The marketing mix includes those elements over which the marketer has control: product, price, distribution, and communication. Depending on the product marketed, the advertiser may use packaged-goods advertising, professional services advertising, or some other type such as high-tech advertising. Likewise, the firm's pricing strategy will determine if it should use sale advertising, loss-leader advertising, or regular price-line advertising. The distribution strategy dictates the firm's use of local, regional, national, or international advertising. The communication element determines the mix of marketing communications tools to be used. These include advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations activities, and collateral materials. To achieve consistency in all the organization's messages, sophisticated companies seek to integrate their marketing communications with all other corporate activities through a process called integrated marketing communications. |