With more and more advertising vehicles crowding today's marketing environment -- including traditional print, television and radio ads, product placements, Internet buzz, viral campaigns and cell phone messaging -- marketers have new opportunities to reach vast pools of potential customers.
But the tangle of options also requires any successful marketing plan to take into account the nature of the product, its durability in the public's mind and the advertising budget needed to make it all work. As Wharton professor David Bell notes: It's very hard to find "the one big lever that can reach a whole lot of people in a way that is cost-effective."
Knowledge@Wharton asked four Wharton marketing professors -- Eric Bradlow, Jehoshua Eliashberg, David Schmittlein and Bell -- to suggest strategies for launching two hypothetical products, a summer blockbuster movie and a cell phone. While each professor had specific ideas, all agreed that the best way to spend marketing dollars wisely is to know the potential upsides and downsides of your product, and identify your target audience as precisely as possible.
Go for the Soft Launch
According to Eric Bradlow, no matter what the product, marketers should consider a preliminary soft launch in sample markets to determine what works best before investing in a full-scale campaign. "You have to measure the efficiencies of any given vehicle. Many companies run test launches because, as the number of options expands, it makes it more difficult for a company to know how to allocate its advertising dollars. Before I spend a lot of money, I would want to empirically validate what is going to work.
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