MARKETING
Advertising Must Relate to Marketing Plan Magazine choice should be based on company reader preference studies and subscriber analysis 147TH
ACS
NATIONAL
MEETING
Chemical Marketing and Economics
The plans for an industrial advertising campaign must set forth advertising objectives as well as a method for measuring how well the campaign succeeds. According to Thomas F. Casey, Reinhold Publishing Co. (advertising sales management for ACS publications), plans for industrial ad campaigns involve three fundamental steps. • Define the marketing problem and devise a marketing plan which will lead to maximum profit. • Evaluate the contribution that industrial advertising can offer to the marketing effort and the cost of the advertising. • Set up advertising goals as opposed to marketing and sales goals. Then measure attainment of these goals within economic limits. These basic rules apply to choosing magazines for advertising as well as to selecting any other media for advertising, Mr. Casey told a symposium on the role of advertising in the chemical industry. He explains that marketing can be described as the coordination of all corporate activities to the profitmaking goal for the short, middle, and long term. Everyone knows that advertising can help sales. But specific information is needed to make the best advertising decisions. For example: What people would it be advantageous to inform or influence in the companies that are sales targets? Mr. Casey feels that most sales and marketing organizations have only incomplete information about the people that should be reached in order to sell most economically to a particular company. The results of several studies by Reinhold show a similar pattern for every customer-prospect company 30
C&EN
APRIL
2 0,
1964
studied. Salesmen were not contacting, and were not able to identify, an important number of the claimed buying influences. A large number of people, who are not visited by salesmen, claim to have primary and secondary buying influence in their companies. Even firms with large sales forces are not able to send salesmen to see the significant people who have an important part in the choice of vendor in many buying situations. Virtually everyone in marketing agrees that this is so but many do not appreciate the magnitude of the large unseen group of true buying influences. Obviously, advertising can give broad, penetrating coverage of these bu\ing influences and at low cost. Advertising's prime function is to communicate information and help form attitudes. It can persuade but it does not close sales—salesmen have to do that. But advertising does save time for the salesman. It also increases his effectiveness. Today, the chemical industry is in a marketing revolution and industry must actively seek further specialization in marketing and selling techniques to reduce selling costs. Mr. Casey adds that advertising can shorten the time it takes to bring products to the market and reach their market potential. Even when a company has a new product, competition is not far behind. Seldom does a company have a distinctly new product for long and there are likely to be few examples of product exclusiveness in the future. Really Low Cost. Advertising's cost is relatively low—it costs mere pennies to reach each reader with an advertisement. However, no advertiser is ever interested in all of a magazine's subscribers. The target audience may well include only one out of every 10 readers. In that case, the cost per page of advertising per useful subscriber may range from 16 cents to as high as 65 cents. By comparison, a sales call costs an average of $32. Hence, the advertiser's approach should be to use
low-cost messages where they will suffice and save the $32 messengers for jobs on which they are most needed. The $32 messenger, Mr. Casey says, will be more productive where he has been preceded, reinforced, backed up, extended, and followed up by the penny messages. But the question is: Which magazines have the circulation that comes closest to a company's marketing goals? A precise category-by-category count of subscribers is one way to determine this. However, most magazines do not provide adequate information of this type. Among the magazines that do provide such information, classifications differ from magazine to magazine, making positive comparisons difficult. Hence, it is seldom possible to evaluate publications or compare them critically on the basis of their circulation statements alone, Mr. Casey says. One usable tool in magazine selection is the reader preference study. Some of these studies are expertly conceived and executed although there can be pitfalls in such areas as sample selection and the assumption that each respondent has an equal purchasing influence. Mr. Casey offers two suggestions on selecting magazines for advertising. The first is a reader preference study of known buying influences in the company's markets. The company itself should make such a study, not the advertising agencies or the publication, he says. The second suggestion is that the advertiser designate representative companies in its market and ask the publication to supply the names and titles of its subscribers who are employed by these companies. Although some publications may protest, they can provide the information. (C&EN does this today using punched cards. This information will soon be transferred to computer tapes and its scope expanded considerably.) Also, industrial publications should be able to provide market information to advertisers and potential advertisers, Mr. Casey believes. Such data as the number of producers, products made, and products bought can be provided. These data, used in conjunction with a company's own market data, can help to verify market information and expand its value. This, in turn, can be helpful in selecting a magazine for advertising, Mr. Casey says.
