e-book Integrated Advertising, Promotion, and Marketing Communications, 8th Edition
Author: Kenneth E. Clow; Donald E. Baack
Developing a Relationship with a Client
Many businesses and individuals seek the assistance of advertising agencies to create effective and targeted messages to send to customers. When a company or individual businessman approaches an agency to create an advertising campaign, they begin a relationship that determines its success. The agency should also strive to meet the needs of the client for long-term interactions. While the agency has professionals capable of developing effective advertising campaigns, they depend on the relationship and partnership with the client to understand their needs and design what the client wants.
The advertising agency has the knowledge and skills necessary to design effective advertising campaigns, but they don’t know what the client wants. Therefore, they need to work closely with the client to know their needs and create effective and targeted messages. An advertising agency should develop a relationship with a client to engage them throughout the campaign and deliver their expectations. One of the ways to achieve this is to maintain two-way communication and a friendly client-agency relationship. Effective communication allows understanding and prevents any possibility of confusion and conflicts between the two parties. Another condition ensures commitment between the two parties to make the relationship work in a give-and-take environment. The agency should be honest and committed and maintain professionalism to the campaign to make it successful and ensure client satisfaction. They should have a contract that spells out the terms and conditions and the parties’ responsibility.
Creating an effective advertisement campaign necessitates much more than simply having a good product or a special message to deliver to customers. Instead, it should be a creative process that necessitates careful planning concerning various advertisement strategies to appeal to the target customers. Message strategies help the creative team communicate the brand to the target audience, making is a clear plan for the campaign. Effective campaigns require effective use of “appeals” and message strategies in designing a successful advertising campaign. They should use the strategy and integrate the appeals into the campaign to create a coherent and persuasive message to target customers to convince them about the need to buy the product or use a service. Depending on the nature of the message and the type of product or service, the creative team can use one of the different appeals, including emotional appeal, fear appeals, humor appeals, scarcity appeals, musical appeals, rational appeals, or sexual appeals, they should be cautious about using the right appeal for a campaign to avoid veering off the intended objective or effect. For example, they combine emotional and rational appeal in the message strategy because customers base their buying decisions on the two appeals. They should understand that specific appeals only work for certain products and relate to the message to create an effective ad campaign.
Advertising plays a vital role in marketing since it sends a targeted message about a product or brand to the target customers. This aspect of marketing led to the development of advertisement agencies and creative professionals to help companies get the message to the customer effectively. Success depends on the relationship between the client and the advertising agency and the ability of the creative team to use appeals and message strategies to develop effective campaigns. Successful advertising can make a difference in the success of a business, a brand or product in the market.