Effective Advertising Strategies for Your Business

As the media landscape evolves over the past few years, especially with the emergence of interactive media and social media, the philosophy of advertising is significantly changing. Most businesses realize that the old days when they relied on three national networks (ABC, NBC, & CBS) and a few national newspapers to advertise are gone, thus they don't want to do standardized advertising anymore. Many of them start to adopt more individualized advertising approaches, empowered by internet technology. For instance, Amazon greets returning consumers by name upon logging in and offers a hyperlink to product recommendations congruent with their past purchases. Although a few technology corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are showing success in delivering individualized advertising messages to consumers, this approach (including both personalization and customization) is not suitable for all businesses. The problem in the real world is that many corporations don't know what strategy is the best for their businesses. The purpose of this book, then, is to outline three fundamental strategies of advertising: standardized, targeted, and individualized. It will describe each strategy in detail and lay out their good and bad. The importance of collecting consumer insights and incorporating those insights into the advertising message will be highlighted. The final conclusion is that no single strategy is absolutely more effective than the others. A decision of adopting which strategy needs to be based on a scrutiny of the business' proposition and consumers' expectations.

Cong Li is an Associate Professor in Advertising at the University of Miami's School of Communication. He received his PhD in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds a master's degree in mass communication from Kansas State University and an MBA in international business from the University of Miami. He has published in a number of scholarly journals inside and outside the communication discipline, and has won the top paper award at national advertising and communication conferences several times.