Advertising Management

Hierarchy of Effects Model 

Hierarchy of Effects Model states that there are six steps a consumer or a business buyer moves through when making a purchase:

A good advertising strategy is structured around these 3 questions:

• Who is the message targeted at?
• At which of these steps is the targeted audience?
• How to source your message?

In order to answer the first question, the marketer should resort to a concept called "Segmentation".

Segmentation

Segmentation can be done based on a range of criteria:

• Demographics
• Psychpgraphics
• Generations
• Geographic
• Geodemographics
• Benefits
• Usage

The segmentation here, however, is not in the way of segmentation for product development; but rather, segmenting depending on the type of audience that you want to design an advertisement towards. A product can easily be targeted at different types of consumer bases, but often times achieving attraction upon different consumer segments requires a different message being delivered to each individual segment.

An example can be given with Head&Shoulders' recent advertising campaigns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZQ8VdqpdRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zs_02s94E0

Answering the second question comes into play while determining your message strategy.

Message Strategy

There are plenty of strategies to choose from. Determining which stage your audience is at helps select which strategies are viable for achieving attraction.

Cognitive

• Generic
• Preemptive
• Unique selling proposition
• Hyperbole
• Comparative

Affective

• Resonance
• Emotional

Conative

• Encourage customer action
• Support promotional efforts
• Impulse buys

Sourcing

Celebrity Spokespersons

Using celebrity spokespersons for promoting a product has always been a thing. But in the past decade, it has been evolving quite significantly with the emergence of social media celebrities.

Especially for cognitive message deliverence, advertisements have been losing impact on customers. Studies show that customers are getting more and more skeptical every year about advertisements. This results in them not investing attention in advertisements as they appear as trickery by big corporations. As social media celebrities are much more relatable as a source of information about products, many companies now send free products to YouTube reviewers as a cognitive marketing communications strategy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju6ERMA_5xE

As you can see, this strategy achieve attraction very effectively while requiring next to no advertisment costs.

In this image, you can see how many products are shipped to Unboxtherapy for reviews every day.

Crowd Sourcing

Sometimes you as a marketer do not have to design the advertisement yourself.  Crowd sourcing and customer review strategies are seeing more use as they naturaly appear as more "relatable" to the audience.

Tadelle's advertising contest is not only a good example for crowd sourcing also for the usage of social media celebrities as the 2 boys in this commercial are Vine phenomenons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbttYop1IwM