Pros and Cons of Advertising - Essay Example

Businesses and organizations need to get the attention of the mostly busy 21st-century citizens of the world. Advertising strategies have to be well planned for them to be successful in today’s advertisement jungle. Failure to come up with a well-planned advertising strategy could cost the company lots of money.
Advertising contributes a lot to the economy. Advertising is now a 250+ billion dollar industry. Advertising is a substantial part of the income of mass media. Advertising creates jobs in the economy. Advertising has been the ingredient that has made many firms successful. Disallowing advertising would cause the failure of many of those firms. Failure of firms hurts the economy (Taylor). On the contrary, the successes of business enterprises have a positive impact on the overall economy thus creating more jobs. Advertising has become the prime source of marketplace information for consumers (Taylor). Many readers are grateful for advertising because it lets the vendor speak directly to the consumer about the product, without the editorial filtering evident in most reviews and resource articles (Hegener). Paid commercial advertising can be viewed as a gesture of faith in the reader's ability to weigh the arguments provided and make an informed decision. Many readers purchase magazines specifically for the advertising they contain, and travel, hobby, computer, and fashion magazines are only a few categories where advertising routinely makes up a large percentage of the overall content (Hegener).

However, today’s advertising field is like a jungle, advertising media in any form are being bombarded with a huge amount of advertisements. For businesses to attract a customer's attention to their particular advertisement, the ads need to be eye-catching and perhaps make use of the psychological effects of color (Advertising). One main disadvantage of advertisement is that consumers may tend to be more familiar with a whole brand, as opposed to individual products (Advertising). Moreover, the process of advertising has made the consumer associate values with products that may not have a real connection to them - for instance, Nike has always selected rebellious athletes to promote its shoes, the 'bad boys' of basketball, tennis & football, and therefore the Nike brand has connotations of rebelliousness, of doing whatever it takes to win (Advertising). Another notable disadvantage of advertising is that it contributes to the high cost of consumer goods. The high cost of advertising is usually added to the overall cost of the product or services that the consumer buys. One best example of this is the drug industry. Generic drugs or unbranded drugs are several times cheaper than most famous brands that paid dearly for their promotion despite having the same generic content.
Advertising does not control human behavior it merely influences it and it works by way of a sequence of communication events (Taylor). Despite the popularity of advertisements, the quality of the product or services offered cannot be ignored. It is still the deciding factor for business success. Read More