2. What Does Advertising Do?

Most people would probably assume that advertising helps sell products. This is true, but the process by which it does so is not always straightforward; or else why, for example, would companies that sell only very expensive computing or network equipment advertise on the telly (and many do), when the vast majority of the people who will see the commercials will probably not even understand what a router or server does, let alone want to buy one? The reason is that sales can be improved in two ways, with correspondingly different advertising approaches.

Promotional advertising

Promotional advertising is a direct attempt to get customers to purchase: ‘Sale ends this week’ or ‘Buy one get one free’, for example. It was this kind of blunt sales message that gave birth to advertising.

Promotional advertising today is still largely about raising awareness of a special offer or product that will have an appeal to a particular audience. In this sense, it can sometimes act more as a public information service than a sales tool. There is in fact some evidence to suggest that this is how advertising works – by providing raw information to customers who then base their buying behaviour on other, more subtle factors.

Brand advertising

One of these ‘more subtle factors’ is how the consumer feels about the company whose products they are buying. As I pointed out in Chapter 9, buying decisions are based as much on emotions as they are on rational thought. What this means in practice is that, all other things being equal, people are more likely to buy goods from companies they feel an affinity with. It is obviously very difficult for a consumer to get enough information to make a considered judgement on every business they interact with, so this affinity is usually based on the kind of evaluation we all carry out when meeting other people for the first time.

When you meet someone, you form an idea of them based on their appearance, on what they say and, over time, what they do. If their appearance, thoughts and actions mirror yours closely, you are likely to have a high degree of affinity with them. (Note how, when you are introduced to someone, you will usually try to find out what they do, where they come from and so on, in order to establish common ground.)

With businesses, this combination of image, communication and action is effectively what is known as the ‘brand’. As with people, businesses can create a high degree of initial affinity with their customers through image and communications alone. Much of the effort in modern-day businesses is devoted to creating brands rather than manufacturing, a process documented in Naomi Klein’s best-selling book No Logo, among others. Some companies, such as Nike, for example, even attribute most of their success to this shift. But ultimately, this ‘brand value’ will be lost if the actions of the business do not measure up to what it says.

This has not stopped advertisers from cottoning on to the fact that commercials can have a profound effect on the way people feel about their businesses. Hence brand advertising: a whole area of communications that is not about selling per se, but rather about the philosophies and values that the advertiser wants its customers to believe it embraces. The Apple computer ad discussed in Chapter 8, for example, is an excellent example of brand advertising, and nowadays this type of communication increasingly dominates the market.

By now you may have realised that brand and promotional advertising can work together to great effect, with the former creating the empathy that will attract customers to a company and the latter providing information that can act as a trigger to generate sales. When you take on ad copywriting work it is important for you to establish what kind of advertising your client wants as this will affect your approach. It is also important to point out that a single commercial can act on both a brand and a promotional level.

Brand positioning

Advertising can help link a brand to a set of attributes in the mind of the consumer, a process called brand positioning. Car brands provide an excellent example of this in action. Despite the fact that most cars look pretty similar these days, and are built to very similar standards, as far as the public is concerned Volvo stands for ‘safe’ (or, latterly, ‘safe but quite racy’), Volkswagen stands for ‘reliable’, Land Rover stands for ‘rugged’ and so on. It could be argued that most of the sales of modern cars (and indeed of many other goods) are dependent on the attributes attached to the product through brand positioning.