by Jonathon Bright

Created on: August 01, 2010

“Advertising is like rattling a swill bucket with a big stick” according to Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell. This is in essence the purpose of advertising – letting potential customer's know about a product or service in the loudest way possible.

A more academic definition of advertising would outline a three step process. Number one would be the identification of an opportunity for the product or service. The second step would identify the customers who would best respond to the opportunity. The final step would be to create the most relevant and distinctive ways of communicating to the customers who may buy the product.

Anyone with training in advertising will tell you effective advertising needs to follow the AIDA model. A business needs to create Awareness for the product, Interest for the product, a Desire in customers for the product and finally Action in buying the product.

Awareness

In some ways this sound obvious but there is a little more to it than simply putting an advert together. To raise Awareness the advert needs to be aimed at the people most likely to buy. The type of person being targeted may need to be communicated to in a very different way than other groups of people. Advertising a new radio station specialising in rock music requires very different advertising to that promoting a radio station playing classical music.

Interest

Even if people gain some awareness their Interest needs to be piqued. A person may be aware that a new product is available but may only become interested if they feel it is aimed at them, the attributes of the product are demonstrated in a convincing way or the advertising is executed in such an engaging way that they are seduced into finding out more.

Desire

The Desire phase is when the consumer is persuaded to make the purchase by having a desire so strong that it can only be satisfied by product purchase. Often customers evaluate a range of options before making the final decision. Generally, the more expensive or important the purchase the longer the evaluation process but Desire is key to every purchase.

Action

Finally, the entire process is concluded with the Action of purchase. If someone has made the decision to purchase a particular product they need to be able to get it easily. It's no good running a great ad campaign and then the product is only available in a few outlets.

Effective advertising maximises opportunities at all these stages and advertising uses everything from humour through to celebrity endorsements to make ads stand out in a competitive market place.

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