Research from books

I borrowed three books about advertising from the local library and found them quite interesting. The books are called "Advertising for Dummies", "How to advertise", "www.advertising" The three books mention similar ways to create a good advertisements therefore I now want to make sure that I follow what I have learned in order to make our advert as good as it can be.

The book which I found really useful was "Advertising for Dummies" and I would recommend it to you. The least useful was "www.advertising" because despite it having good ideas, it was mainly aimed at online advertising which we are not doing.


The following key information that i gathered, taken from the book 'Advertising for Dummies 2nd Edition' (this book provided me with really usefull information)

How to write a good advertising copy
-Make yours ads relevant and memorable
-Find, or invent, a creative jingle
-Write the way people think
-Before creating your advert, you need to know why people buy your product
-Creativity is hard work, don't get lazy with it.
-Deliver the same message across all media
-Keep it simple, the consumer needs to udnerstand it and also doesn't have time for complex copy
-Deliver your message with clarity.

Audience: Focusing on your primary market
A lot of business owners (and ME!) fall into the trap of beleiving that their products or services are "for everyone" - anyone would be interested in or needs the products. However it is wrong to think like this because even if you product appeals to a broad market, you need to identify who you ideal consumer is. Eg. childs toy aimed for rich parents.


Audience: Identifying & targeting the audience
3 Questions that I should be thinking about throughout the process of creating the 3 advertisements:
-What are you selling and what makes it so unique?
-To whom do you want to sell it
-Why should people buy the product from you?

"It is critical to know who your target audience is because the advert will not be successful if it doesn't appeal to what your potential customers want or need."

I read this in the book and this has made me realise that I need to be more aware of what our target audience want, and we need to do more research into our target audience. We did already decide that we want our mints to be aimed for an audience of young teens to mid 20s however after reading the section on audience in the book, i feel that we don't know our target audience well enough. Therefore I am going to create a questionnaire in which I can had out to people of our target audience in order to find out what they expect to have in a new mint on the market. I think that once I have got the feedback from the questionnaires, I will make it much easier to create clearer storyboards.