ADVERTISING STRATEGY AN APPROACH

Conventionally, the fluctuations of the market share of a specific product are blamed on the success or the failure of the advertising efforts behind it. The perception of advertising as a most important factor influencing the market share is the natural consequence of the philosophy which is adopted by many of the advertising agencies as advertising can seli anything». This dogmatic approach of the advertising agencies as $ Ads —* $ Sales had albc influenced the management scientists dealing with the advertising. Vidale and Wolfe (7), in their.model, hypothesized this relationship. Although they took the çarry-over effects of the previous advertising efforts into acount, the market response function was mainly the function of the advertising expenditure, and 'they ignore the effect of other marketing mix variables such as price, distribution, personal selling, ete... The later applications, even though they ineluded these effects into the problem area, failed to detect the causality relationship between the marketing mix variables and, thus, again were dominated mainly by the conventional input-output relationship. James VVallace (9), w'hiîe dealing with the efficiency of advertising, points out that the contribution of advertising to sales is almost immeasurable. By saying that after aîlocating the profit generated from sales among the marketing mix variables, except advertising, according to their efficiencies, what is left is the measure of efficiency of advertising. In this sense, the success and the effect of advertising cannot be measurable, due to the impossibility of attributing an efficiency measure to eaclı of the marketing mix variables while they were interacting with each other. Stewart Henderson Britt C2), in his analysis of 135 campaigns by 40 advertising agencies suggested the achievement of the campaign's objectives objectives, in quantiable terms, as a «proof of success» for the advertising campaigns. Referring to these two authors, it is evident that the advertising, being a marketing mix variable, interacts with other variables of the mix and according to its importance in the mix its röle difers from one marketing program to another and from one campaign to another. Thus, it seems important that, in order to evaluate the röle and efficiency of the advertising, first its importance in the mix should be determined and second its objectives as a direct consequence of its röle in the mix should be set. It is the objective of this work to propose a procedure to evaluate the importance of advertising in the marketing mix and set its objectives 'vvithin an effective strategy which permits their implementation. The data concerning the California Prunes and Prune Juice, which will be used to clarify the concepts, were gathered by the author in December 1971 as a part of a research conducted in Palo Alto, California.