18. Speak about advertising as one of the promotional tools.

Advertising is an important tool of promotion. . Advertisement is a non-personal presentation of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.

Functions of Advertising

Advertising performs the following functions:

•Promotion of Sales. It promotes the sale of goods and services by informing and persuading the people to buy them.

•Introduction of New Product. It helps the introduction of new products in the market.

•Creation of Good Public Image. It builds up the reputation of the advertiser. . This increases the reputation of the firm which is necessary to fight against competition in the market.

•Mass Production. Advertising facilitates large-scale production.

•Research. Advertising stimulates research and development activities. Advertising has become a competitive marketing activity

•Education of People. Advertising educate the people about new products and their uses.

•Support to Press. Advertising provides an important source of revenue to the publishers and magazines.

19. What is the difference between Personal selling and Sales promotion?

Sales promotion- It refers to short-term use of incentives like discounts,free samples, displays, exchange offers, free gifts, exhibitions, road shows to attract the potential customers and to achieve more sales value.

Whereas personal selling is performing the task of selling through individual or representative by face to face interaction with customer. It is also known as salesman-ship.

20. What are the advantages and the disadvantages of Public Relations? Why do marketers tend to underuse it?

Public relations is used to promote products, people, places, ideas, activities, organizations, and even nations. Companies use PR to build good relations with consumers, investors, the media, and their communities .

There are a variety of advantages of PR and the overriding one is its power appeal to a large audience. If it is a newspaper or a magazine, millions of readers will see the information of your business and understand it. In addition, if it is a TV advertisement, it can reach an even greater audience and they will see the information which introduces your business on TV.

The second advantage of PR is a great appealing power and responses. The information, which the highly public mass communication picks up from a lot of information, becomes at a premium for the readers and audiences at that point. Therefore it is the greatest characteristic of PR to bring an effect which creates needs by shaking up the targeted consumers' minds, who receive the information.

The third advantage of PR is inexpensiveness of the cost. The cost to carry out the PR activity always occurs, but you can control the expense if you compare it to the other ways of advertising.

Disadvantages

At first, PR is a very difficult discipline to understand conduct successfully. A strategy supported by the professional knowledge of the media will be needed if you want to get into the media where you can get high responses to your promotions.

Secondly, it is hard to predict the responses of the audience. However, the responses of the PR last around 3 days to 1 week at most. So then a business plan will be necessary that utilizes the media exposure well without getting influenced by the needs which temporally went up.

The PR may end up with a result that gives the opposite effect, unless the management which involves the assessment of risks is done.

Public relations is sometimes described as a marketing stepchild because of its often limited and scattered use.

The PR department is often located at corporate headquarters or handled by a third-party agency.

Its staff is so busy dealing with various publics—stockholders, employees, legislators, and the press—that PR programs to support product marketing objectives may be ignored. Moreover, marketing managers and PR practitioners do not always speak the same language.