Assistant General Manager-Marketing, Hiland Group @ The Heritage Academy

Aug. 17, 2010 - PRLog -- The seminar was initiated by Mr. Bratin Maiti, faculty BBA (H), who welcomed the speaker and called upon Prof. Gour Banerjee, Principal, The Heritage Academy, to introduce the topic. Prof. Gour Banerjee introduced the topic by saying that advertisement is the essence of business. Present day advertising has changed 180 degrees from what it was 10 years back. For creating awareness among the students, he requested Mr. Bitan Chakraborty to enlighten the students on the topic.

The speaker started the seminar by saying that the purpose of the seminar was to shift the students from consumers of advertising to students of advertising in the future. He had named his presentation as ‘The "ladders” in our minds’. The objective of advertising is to move the product higher up the ladder of demand and popularity in the minds of the customers. He asked questions to the students to make the seminar an interactive one. He asked questions like ‘, What do people actually buy when they buy a preferred  brand’.

The speaker talked to them about the iconic heroes and how they are portrayed in advertisements to create an aura that they want to associate with a brand. He enlightened the students on how one arrives at the advertising idea-  the who, what and how of the advertising idea. The important factors which help decide on the advertising idea are the target group, marketing objective, brand positioning, USP (unique selling proposition) , communication objective and so on. Examples from daily usable items like Kelloggs cornflakes and Maggi were used to put forward the idea.
 
Mr Bitan Chakraborty gave an interesting and valuable insight into the reason of failure of cornflakes. He then moved forward to discuss how the profession of advertising started in the barter era. It started with word of mouth communication as a form of communication.  Then came the town criers who would move from village to village announcing about the advent of any incident. The industrial revolution brought the idea of mass production which in turn made the producers think how is my product better than his. That is how advertising started. Formal advertising was started by a person from Philadelphia who first thought of putting an advertisement in the newspaper for the purpose of selling a piece of land of his aunt.

He also enlightened the students on the different product and service levels. The different levels are core benefit, basic product, expected product, augmented product and potential product. The marketer tries to promote his product by highlighting more than one product level. The objective of Advertising is to inform, persuade and remind the customers. The advertiser also has to keep in mind the different types of appeals. The rational appeal can be used for the advertisement of a car. Emotional appeal works best for advertisements for items like fairness creams, whereas moral appeals can be used for tourism advertisements.

The last topic of discussion was how to design the advertisement. Two very important factors to be kept in mind here are ‘Who is saying it’, which includes brands personality and philosophy, nature of product (high involvement purchase or low involvement purchase) and to whom it is being said. A product has functional or tangible benefits and perceived or intangible benefits. He explained what is brand image citing the example of a Mercedes car. The three entities involved in creating an advertisement are the marketer, the agency and media. The main entity in an advertisement is the customer. The golden rule of Advertising is to think from the point of view of the customer. The brand is what the customer perceives and not what the marketer or the creator of the advertisement thinks, but one should always remember to do justice to the brand.  Advertising is the act of informing about a product or service. To sum up it is Salesmanship in Print. Advertisement is successful only if it helps to sell.

The Seminar was attended by the 1st year, 2nd year and 3rd year students of BBA (H) and the faculty members of The Heritage Academy who found the seminar very interesting.

# # #

Anything inspires and displays the youth of India and creates a society desperate to committ themselves for the welfare of the country.