A Literature Review on Advertising Techniques and Strategies

This literature review examines the evolution of advertising as a marketing communication tool, emphasizing its role in informing, persuading, and influencing consumer behavior. It references key sources like Kotler, Kartajaya, and Hooi (2017), highlighting that effective advertising is crucial for increasing the return on investment. The review explores various techniques such as emotional appeal, bandwagon, promotional tactics, facts and statistics, and endorsements, alongside strategies that influence consumer actions. Ferrier's (2014) action advertising framework is discussed, which focuses on changing behavior by influencing motivation and ease of undertaking a behavior. The review also covers the importance of understanding the target audience and the selection of appropriate media channels to achieve specific marketing objectives. The study concludes that businesses must consider their objectives, target audience, and media when deciding on advertising strategies to positively attain results.

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Advertising Techniques and Strategies –
Literature Review
Advertising concept has developed over the years as marketing communication tool to reach,
inform, persuade and convince the ever changing customer demographics. According to Kotler,
Kartajaya, and Hooi, (2017), advertising is a paid form of communicating and informing
importance information by an organization to promote goods, ideas or services. Advertisements
provide information to potential customers about their needs or a desire that can be fulfilled by
using a product (Jain, and Roy, 2016). With the increasing number of products in the market,
advertisements need to be effective to increase return value of the advertising cost. Successful
advertisements create desires to listeners, viewers or readers that influence their purchasing
behaviour towards a certain product. According to Zhang, Liang, and Wang (2016), advertising
as a communication tool for marketing, requires techniques and strategies to motivate consumer
behaviour and cause action that increase sales. The advertising strategy motivates and makes it
easy for consumers to perform behaviour (behavioural propensity). Advertising techniques
increase success of an advertiser informing customers about the products, increasing sales,
acquiring marketing value and gaining reputation in the industry (Jain and Roy, 2016).
Advertising strategy involve series of tactics that inform advertising decisions to achieve a
specific marketing objective. Jain and Roy (2016) in their study established that advertising
strategy require an understanding of the products primary objective or benefits and the target
audience to decide on the effective medium.
Advertising strategy form an important part to deciding on the tactics to be used for advertising
purposes. Kumar, (2017) stated that effective advertising strategy can be broken down into steps
that enhance the achievement of the marketing objectives. The first step is defining the business
or product goals, identifying current behaviours that need to be changed to achieve the identified
goals, selecting appropriate behavioural strategies that will convince customers to purchase and
developing creative ideas that are based on behavioural strategies outlined. According to Kotler,
Kartajaya, and Hooi (2017), advertising strategy lead to determination of where the service or
product is positioned in the market i.e. market share and customer perceptions, target audience

both primary and secondary, media channels to reach target audience, selling point of the product
and the indicators of effective campaign.
Ferrier (2014) outlined advertising strategies that influence target audience actions. He holds that
advertising should be about changing behaviour to ultimately get the value of the advertisements.
Ferrier outlined in his study in 2014 an action advertising framework that plot motivation to
undertake behaviour against the ease of undertaking the behaviour. Therefore, organizations
should influence the behaviour that needs to be changed by influencing behavioural motivation
and enhancing behavioural ease. To achieve behavioural motivation, Ferrier stated that
motivation strategies drivers can either happen as individual incentives or as social norms while
ease strategies can be enhanced by considering the ability or opportunity of the target behaviour.
The motivation strategies include; utility strategy that help people achieve own goals, modelling
strategy that use inspirational personalities, experts and celebrities who have high profiles,
reframing strategy that target to reframe a behaviour on a positive light, evocation strategy that
stir powerful emotions, ownership strategy that invite target audience to participate and be part
of the campaign, collectivism strategy that involve creating or reinforcing social norms that are
desirable behaviour, and play strategy that involve making desirable behaviours enjoyable. The
ease advertising strategies by Ferrier are; skill-up strategy that shows target audience how to do
certain behaviour, eliminate-complexity strategy that reduce or remove barriers when
undertaking target behaviour, and commitment strategy that induce small action within the target
behaviour. Ferrier (2014) concluded that the more motivation and easy it is to undertake a
behaviour, the higher the behavioural propensity.
According to Kotler, Kartajaya, and Hooi (2017), advertising technique depend on smart and
creativity thinking to create the advertisement and achieve predetermined goals. The advertising
technique need to appeal to target audience and get desirable results. Advertising techniques
include emotional appeal, bandwagon, promotional, facts and statistics, endorsements,
questioning customers, complementing customers, and ideal kids or ideal family. Ashley and
Tuten (2015) stated that emotional appeal is one of the most effective advertising strategies and
it does connect need factors and consumer fear factors. The technique considers needs factors
such as acceptable, something new, not being ignored, security and becoming attractive. The fear
factors in emotional appeal technique are fear of death, accident, getting sick, getting old and

being avoided. Promotional advertising technique involves giving samples for free in order to
get customer attention. The bandwagon advertising technique convinces target customers to
joining a group of people who are seen to be in the winning side. Facts and statistic advertising
technique use proofs, numbers and real examples that are aimed at showing the product is good.
Endorsements advertising technique use people with influence in the society to advertise
products who tell their own experiences (Smits et al., 2015). Therefore, different advertising
techniques can be used to create advertisements and achieve different goals.
From the literature review, several advertising strategies and techniques have been studied that
can be used by businesses to achieve certain objectives. Businesses have to consider their
objectives, target audience and the medium where their target audience is when deciding on
advertising strategies and techniques. The business should also consider target audience
behaviour in order to influence them and positively attain results.

References
Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1),
pp.15-27.
Ferrier, A., 2014. The advertising effect: How to change behaviour. OUP Catalogue.
Jain, V. and Roy, S., 2016. Understanding meaning transfer in celebrity endorsements: a
qualitative exploration. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 19(3), pp.266-
286.
Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H. and Hooi, D.H., 2017. Marketing Strategy For Value
Exploration. World Scientific Book Chapters, pp.175-190.
Kumar, A., 2017. Role of Celebrity Endorsement in Advertisement: A Study of Cold
Drink. Engineering and Science, 2(2), pp.188-192.
Smits, T., Vandebosch, H., Neyens, E. and Boyland, E., 2015. The persuasiveness of child-
targeted endorsement strategies: A systematic review. Annals of the International
Communication Association, 39(1), pp.311-337.
Zhang, H., Liang, X. and Wang, S., 2016. Customer value anticipation, product innovativeness,
and customer lifetime value: The moderating role of advertising strategy. Journal of Business
Research, 69(9), pp.3725-3730.