Advantages and Disadvantages of Advertising

Advertising is the backbone of any marketing strategy adopted by a company and almost every business all over the world spend huge sums of money on doing advertisement. The big question is whether advertisement is useful or not and in order to answer this question let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of advertising –

Advantages of Advertising

1. The biggest advantage of advertising is that it helps the company in creating awareness about the product or service which the company is offering because how will people know what product or service you are selling unless you advertised about it. Without crying even mothers don’t feed their little babies, in the same way companies need to make some noise in order to create awareness about the product in the minds of the customers and advertising does exactly that.
2. Advertising helps the company in creating brand image which is very important as far as long term outlook of business is concerned and we all know that brands are not created overnight and advertising is one of the key pillars on which brand image is created thus advertising helps the company in creating long lasting image of the company.
3. It helps the company in expanding their reach to global markets and not limiting itself to local market; it is due to advertising that companies like Apple, Nestle, BMW are known all over the world and their reach is not limited to their respective countries.
4. It is also advantageous to the customer because it gives customer plenty of choice to choose from different products because advertising makes customer aware about the products and hence give customer plenty of alternative for the same set of products which in the end results in customer choosing the best available products from the market at lowest possible price.

Disadvantages of Advertising

1. Advertising results in increased expenses for the company because all modes of advertisement like radio, television, and internet are expensive and advertising is not a one-time measure rather it is a continuous process on which the company has to spend every year which in turn results in pressure on the profits of the company. Hence if advertising is not achieving the desired increase in sales figure of the company then it is an unnecessary expense for the company.
2. Advertisement can be misleading and not all products or services which are advertised are good and hence in a way advertisement gives wrong impression in the minds of consumers leading them to purchase the advertised product or service which are of inferior quality.
3. Another limitation of advertisement is that big companies have undue advantage with them of having higher budget for advertisements whereas local manufacturers or small companies do not have any budget which results in bigger companies advertising and selling those products which are of lower quality than local manufacturers products and hence in a way advertisement kills competition and give larger companies unfair advantage over smaller companies.
4. The cost of advertisements are ultimately reflected in the price of product which the company sells to its customers and at the end it is the customer who has to pay higher price for the product, hence in a way advertisements leads to higher price for a product.

As one can see from the above that advertisement has both benefits as well as limitations, hence one can easily say that advertisement is like a double edged sword which should be used by the company judiciously.