Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Before looking at this in some depth, let us define marketing and advertising,
as they are often confused:
•
Marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or
services, including market research and advertising;
•
Advertising is the activity of producing advertisements for commercial
products or services.
Advertising is one of the tools of marketing and is the mouthpiece of the
business; it is the essential tool to get the brand message across to consumers.
As a culinary business a multitude of different marketing and advertising
techniques need to be used and the challenge is monitoring these so that the
business receives the best return on its expenditure.
There are a number of keys to success, but one of them has to be the mar-
keting strategy. You need to let your target market know your region and
your business exists.
The key to selecting the right marketing and advertising media is:
1.
Consider who is your target audience. Factors to be considered include
geographic location, age group, gender, socio-economic group, occupations.
2.
Focus on individual customer profiles and not all target consumers with
one campaign.
3.
Select the appropriate advertising media for each target group.
4.
Do the research and decide which medium suits the business.
5.
Keep to the advertising standards.
6.
Keep within your working budget.
Most countries have advertising standards and an authority that monitors
such standards. Regulations on advertising vary from country to country,
but the following guidelines should be adhered to:
•
Advertising should be legal, decent and truthful;
•
Advertising should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to the con-
sumer and society; and
•
Advertising should conform to the principles of fair competition.
The most common question we are asked is how much you should invest
in marketing. As a guideline we would recommend that you invest around
2-
4% of your projected yearly turnover in marketing and advertising. If you
are starting a business from scratch it could be higher, but once the business
is established this is a good benchmark figure to work with.
Free marketing - use it to your advantage
A comment we often receive from business owners is that they cannot afford
marketing. There have always been free marketing opportunities in food
tourism and in the future model there will continue to be free marketing op-
portunities. In fact there will be more free opportunities than are currently
