Ch. 16 - Advertising, Public Relations and Sales Promotion

             

     Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of  advertising. 

                                              ------Mark Twain

            

           Advertising is impersonal, one-way mass communication about a product or organization that is paid for by a marketer.

         

            Why do we need advertising?  Because of we need advertising to make customers aware of a product or service. We need advertising to create demand. Advertising is like a tube, which uses to spread a firm’s idea to everybody.  Through the tube, customers begin to familiar with the firm. According to the words above, there might be some people think Apple doesn’t need advertising because it is a worldwide well-known and successful company. That’s no true. Products don’t sell themselves, no matter how good they are. They need to be introduced to market in order to be purchased. On the other hand, even though Apple has great products, it still needs advertising and sales promotion to increase its market shares. In addition, the purpose of advertising is not only to increase sales and informs products, it also be able to transforming a person’s negative attitude about a company or a product into a positive one.

            Apple has many iconic ad campaigns, and its most significant and inspired ad campaigns include the 1984s Super Bowl commercial, the 1990s Think Different campaign, and the IPod people of the 2000s. Because of these meaningful commercials, I would determine Apple as advocacy advertising. Additionally, the company no only satisfies with TV commercials, it also advertises on Internet. The company has its own official website for customers to discover more information about its products. Besides advertising, the company begins to slightly focus on sales promotions. For example, recently the company announced to make its certain Apps for free such as I-work, Pagers, and Numbers.

           

            Since 2009, Apple has doubled its ad budget, hitting $1 billion in 2012. Back in 2009, Apple’s ad budget was a mere $501 millions.