• You will hear five different people talking about advertising campaigns.• For

Woman: I think it’s the best way to do it because it’s better to start small rather than spend all that money on TV ads. We could use local stations as well as bigger ones. A lot of young people listen to them regularly and that’s the market we want to reach. Also, if we do that, we would be able to get some initial feedback on sales, whether it’s selling well or not in the first few months, and then we can decide if we want to make any adjustments before we spend the big money. Bill said he only wanted this to be an experiment at a few branches. If it really goes well, we can have a national campaign when we bring out the rest of the range.
Man: It’s so difficult to know the best way to let people know about this, because if you use something that’s just visual, you’ve then got to make a decision about where to put it. And it may get lost in a mass of other advertising. The only way we can be sure that all potential customers are informed is by delivering a leaflet straight to their homes. There’ll be plenty of really good bargains to attract them and we could have some extra reductions on the first day just to get things off to a good start. We might be able to get some local celebrity to open it on the first day, but we also need to think how we’re going to attract customers for the whole two weeks it’s on.
Woman: Listen, I was talking to Anna and she thinks it’s the sort of thing that we can get a good response to locally but I really don’t agree, so I’m afraid I’ve overruled her on this. Also, if we use something local, it’ll just appear in the classified section and we want a more up- market, boxed ad., and we need to reach the whole country. I know the rates are much higher but we can choose the one we want to get the maximum response possible. Anyway, I think anyone with the right track record for a position like this would only be looking in the more up-market dailies. If it was something we were trying to fill in one of the local branches, it would be a different matter, but for head office we need to attract the best.
Man: As it really only affects people in that area, I think advertising nationally would be a waste of money. It would be much better to take some prime sites at various points along the motorway. We can have them put up about four weeks before the big move. It’ll cost less and it’s a way of appealing directly to our customers. The thing is, we don’t want our regular customers heading off to the old store and then being informed halfway there that it’s not there any more. We could lose a lot of business! They need to know well in advance where they’ve got to go.
Woman: Oh, I don’t think it’s worth using something like a sports event because you still only get a limited audience. We need to attract a national audience. I’m not even sure we should use local channels because their viewing figures are so small and we need millions of people to see this. I definitely think we’ve got to go for maximum exposure. It’ll be a better return for our money in the end. Also it’ll give us a chance to let people know what we really do, rather than just relying on them recognising the logo. People just assume we only do one thing at the moment. We need to build up public awareness of how big our company is. We’ve got to emphasise how diverse we are and get ourselves recognised everywhere.