Text 3. HOW COMPANIES ADVERTISE

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 448.

Advertising informs consumers about the existence and benefits of products and services, and attempts to persuade them to buy them. The best form of advertising is probably word-of-mouth advertising, which occurs when people tell their friends about the benefits of products or services that they have purchased. Yet virtually no providers of goods or services rely on this alone, but use paid advertising instead. Indeed, many organizations also use institutional or prestige advertising, which is designed to build up their reputation rather than to sell particular products.

Although large companies could easily set up their own advertising departments, write their own advertisements, and buy media space themselves, they tend to use the services of large advertising agencies. These are likely to have more resources, and more knowledge about all aspects of advertising and advertising media than a single company. The most talented advertising people generally prefer to work for agencies rather then individual companies as this gives them the chance to work on a variety of advertising accounts (contracts to advertise products or services). It is also easier for a dissatisfied company to give its account to another agency than it would be to fire its own advertising staff.

The client company generally gives the advertising agency an agreed budget; a statement of the objectives of the advertising campaign, known as a brief; and an overall advertising strategy concerning the message to be communicated to the target customers. The agency creates advertisements (the word is often abbreviated to adverts or ads), and develops a media plan specifying which media - newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cinema, posters, mail, etc. - will be used and in which proportions. (On television and radio, ads are often known as commercials.) Agencies often produce alternative ads or commercials that are pre-tested in newspapers, television stations, etc. in different parts of a country before a final choice is made prior to a national campaign.

How much to spend on advertising is always problematic. Some companies use the comparative-parity method -they simply match their competitors' spending, thereby avoiding advertising wars. Others set their ad budget at a certain percentage of current sales revenue. But both these methods disregard the fact that increased ad spending can increase current sales. On the other hand, excessive advertising is counter-productive because after too many exposures people tend to stop noticing ads, or begin to find them irritating. And once the most promising prospective customers have been reached, there are diminishing returns, i.e. an ever-smaller increase in sales in relation to increased advertising spending.

Read and translate the dialogue:

Interviewer: Miranda, what are the key to successful marketing?

Miranda: Well, the key to successful marketing involves many different things. Most people would say successful marketing is just a good creative campaign. Some people would go further than that and say it involves many good marketing communications, reaching the right people, clear marketing messages, and working well with sales teams to get the right sales channels. But the most common definition of marketing is just two words: customer orientation. What does that actually mean though? It really means four things: producing what customers want, when they want it, at the right price and in a way that's profitable for the company, and I believe in that definition very strongly.

Interviewer: Could you describe a marketing campaign that impressed you?

Miranda: Well, marketing is very much in my blood and it's my first love, so there are lots of campaigns I come across every day that really impress me. But I think the most memorable in recent years has been the Orange mobile phone campaign, partly because the whole area of mobile technologies and mobile communications I find very interesting and incredibly exciting, but partly because it was a great campaign in itself. It has the fantastic strap line” the future's bright, the future's orange”, which is so memorable and so meaningful for all segments of the population.

Interviewer: Could you give an example of unsuccessful campaign?

Miranda: Well, I think it was recent campaign where an electrical goods manufacturer tried to roll out a very simple sales promotion. Initially, if you bought any electrical appliance over a certain value, you were promised free flights with every purchase. Now, although initially this campaign did seem to be quite successful because sales went up, in the end they had to stop the campaign because they simply couldn't keep up with the demand and they were overspending a lot on these prizes. So I think basically, from the early stages the campaign was badly planned, badly budgeted and it resulted in a lot of negative publicity for the company.

Read and translate the presentation of a product:

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Peter Chevrel. I'm the General Manager of Espassabi. The purpose of this presentation is to give you some basic information about our company. I'd like to start by saying where we are and what we do. We are situated in Grenoble, and we are manufacturers and retailers of clothes under the “C-Kool” and “Mirabelle” brand names.

Our customers are young men and women from all walks of life, in the age range from 16 to 25. We also supply wholesale products to agents and mail order catalogues.

Now, I'd like to turn to our market position. We are among the French top three in the clothing sector. As regards our workforce, we employ almost 300 people.

If we can now look at our revenues, last year we achieved an annual turnover of 190 million Euros and generated profits of 7.6 million, that is to say 4% of sales.

Finally, a few words about our future plans. We are working on exciting new designs which will reflect a completely new concept of teenage fashion. I'm sure this will make Espassabi the leader of the European fashion market.

7. Use the following plan to make a presentation of a company:

Firstly, greet everybody and thank for coming to the presentation.
Secondly, introduce yourself.

Then give some basic information about your company.

After that, tell about strengths of the company.

Next tell about career opportunities with the company.

Finally say some words about future plans.

In the end thank people for their attention.