Advertising techniques

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Lawrence Litsardopoulos

DISCUSS THE TECHNIQUES USED BY ADVERTISERES IN GENERAL AND THEN IN RELATION TO THREE SPECIFIC ADVERTS

Introduction

Everywhere we look we see advertisements. When we walk down the streets adverts are constantly attracting us, trying to get us to look at them whether we know it or not.  By time you are sixty you will have been exposed to roughly 50 million adverts. Your average high street contains hundreds of different adverts. These are all designed to make us but their brands products. Designers of advertising may spend weeks or months designing a single advert to make it more appealing to the market at which they are aiming. These advertisements can be seen on the television, can be heard on the radio, printed in the newspaper, on the Internet, stuck on walls and even used on vehicles.

Everyday new ways of advertising are dreamt up all trying to do the same job, transfix the right product image onto our minds. Nike, MacDonald’s, Microsoft are a few examples of companies that spend substantial amounts of money on advertising. This is known as Globalisation. Many of these types of companies are taking over smaller brands are springing up everywhere. If we take Nike as an example, during 1987 Nike spent just 40 million dollars on advertising. In just ten years this increased by more than ten times, to almost 500 million dollars. This then doubled in 4 years to almost 1 billion dollars in 2001. These companies are willing to pay vast amount of money to get their brand recognised everywhere.

It seems that no matter how low the prices of smaller companies become, people still opt for the pricier option of the better-known brand. This is because people are willing to pay more for a better-known brand because of what is associated with the brand logo. It is the customer’s emotional investment in the product. The people behind all the money spending are doing it for a good reason. The most successful companies are generally the ones that spend the money on advertisings whether or not they are the best products. Without advertising a product would fail to sell or do well. The main reason for advertising is competition. Without competition there would be no need for advertising. In this essay we will discuss the various techniques used by advertisers to promote their product.

Techniques used

Advertisers use several techniques in order to make their product more appealing to their target audience.  They attempt to make the customer, you and I, feel like we want their product and cannot live without it.

There are two levels on which advertisements appeal to us:

The denotation level: the obvious meaning that appeals to our rational mind.

The connotation level: the level that is beneath the surface, which appeals to our emotional side and acts on our subconscious.

Advertisers use three main subject areas on which to base their promotions. These are: text, image and layout.

Text

 This refers to the types of words used for example: “NEW”, “IMPROVED”, etc.  These are important because words like “NEW” encourage the customer to go for that particular product over the older one. This is all down to the image that people want to give about themselves. This is why advertisers use exciting words to improve the advertisement for the product they are selling. The word TEXT could also refer to statistics or scientific language. These help to prove that this particular product outperforms or is better than its rivals. An example of this could be washing up powder. The advertiser could say that its product washes far better than its rival. It could also say it lasts far longer by showing the number of washes that can be done before having to buy some more. Or it could be humour, puns, alliteration, repetition, play on words and slogans. There are many examples of these; here are some to name but a few:

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an example of a slogan, “I cant believe it’s not butter”. The idea of this is to make a short sentence stick in your mind and when you see the product in the shop to remind you and make you buy it. An example of play on words: an advert for Stella McCartney perfume. It is called “Stella” which is the name of the perfume and or the maker but also “stellar” means star and this can suggest that wearing it will stress the illusion that you are in the company of stars and famous people. This is designed to ...

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