Teacher Takes Notes

As a school student, you may wonder about the place for advertising in your English class.

Why do we need to study advertising at all and what has it got to do with the study of language? Advertising is among the most common (I want to use the word pervasive – if only there was a way to soften its negative connotation somewhat) forms of communication in our lives. The pervasiveness of advertising seems to be a direct consequence of its effectiveness as a form of persuasion. An average person today receives anywhere between 200 and 4,000 advertising messages in a day. According to business reports, the advertising industry is worth more than 1 Trillion US Dollars and is expected to continue to grow its economic and persuasive power.

Advertising is persuasion in action. We give in to it day in and day out. Advertisements tell us what to buy (eat, wear, invest), where to go and what to do. And we listen. Thus, understanding advertising as a topic helps us identify and critically analyse the daily persuasions we face, thus making us more aware as a consumer. In today’s day and age, it has become an essential aspect of media literacy. By learning to critically analyse advertisements, we appreciate the diverse ways in which advertising contributes to economic growth. It also illuminates the principles of persuasive communication, which are key to acquiring communication skills necessary for thriving in the 21st century.

Growth of advertising as a discipline is testament to its effectiveness in communicating messages in a manner that audiences find relevant, creative, and engaging. Advertisements are deliberately designed to engage viewers by evoking emotions. These emotions cause people to react in favour of the product, service, or ideas being propagated. For example, I may be interested in watching an advertisement of a sports car simply because I enjoy watching it, with no intention of actually buying the said car. Because I like watching the advertisement, I may not change the channel on the TV or skip the advertisement on the digital platform if this advertisement shows. Here, I am a consumer of the advertisement’s message rather than the car itself. This is how certain products and brands become household names, well-known and well recognised.

This pervasiveness of advertisements also means that whether or not we consume the products or services or ideas from these advertisers, we end up consuming these advertising messages a lot more. This is also how advertisements and brands become part of the popular culture and take the form of memes, even. Clearly, a consumer is a generic term. It includes people who may or may not buy your product, services, or ideas and people who consume advertising messages for these products, services, or ideas. The target consumer, is someone with the ability and the need to buy these products or services, or buy into these ideas. It is also clear that the target consumer group for any business at any instant will be a small subset of its (overall or larger) consumer group. In order to target this very specific consumer group, the business will use marketing and advertising (M&A) techniques for persuasion.

In this segment, we focus on advertising specifically. Advertising is a function that supports the marketing efforts of a business. It is distinct from marketing in the following ways:

The advertiser must put in efforts to isolate its target consumer within the consumer group either by:

a) sharpening their ability to target this consumer or

b) by deploying strategies to move as many consumers as possible into the target consumer group.

These efforts fall under the marketing and advertising strategy of a business and are extremely important for sales promotion. Sales and marketing (advertising included) go hand in hand, particularly in the modern world where a multitude of products vie for the consumer’s attention.