Types and Styles of Advertising

Being creative and engaging requires more than a natural flair for humour. In the world of marketing, knowing the different types and execution styles of advertising goes a long way in adding to your marketing toolkit, making for more effective strategies in targeting and appealing to consumer needs. Ultimately, advertising is a vastly complex form of communication, with hundreds if not thousands of different advertising categories and ways to get a message across to the consumer on the other end.

We will be breaking down the main three types of advertising approaches in order to shed more light on how you can use each one to strategically convey your well-conceived message to your target audience. Before we start, knowing your specified target audience is the first and most important step before doing anything. By clearly knowing the purpose of your advertisement in light of who your target audience is, your advertising efforts are more likely to be appealing, and this is where you can start to focus your creative talents on implementing different types and styles of advertising to reach out to your audience.

So, let’s talk about advertising appeal and execution style. Your advertising appeal is based on what type of message you use to influence your target audience in order for them to relate to what is being sold. In order to reach the consumer, the right appeal needs to be used and then executed in a style that suits the target audience. Out of the many executional styles that exist, we will be focusing on commonly used styles in this article, how they appeal to the consumer and discussing how the different types of advertising are used by global brands.

Lifestyle
This is consistently one of the most highly used strategies by advertisers everywhere. Lifestyle advertisements are meant to show how the product or service will fit perfectly into the consumer’s lifestyle or raise their convenience or quality of life. This can be associated with a personal appeal of advertising, as it can cause the consumer to desire the depicted lifestyle in the advertisement purely because of the way the product is displayed alongside the shown lifestyle. These types of adverts are designed to make the consumer feel and see the benefit of the product or service to them.

A brilliant example of this is the Volkswagen advert for the Golf GTI called ‘The Man’, which originally aired in 1984. The advert portrays the car as one that you can rely on, even when everything else around you seems to be crumbling, as depicted by the situation the protagonist of the advert is in!

Fantasy
Fantasy and lifestyle are somewhat interlinked when it comes to advertising. It is all about creating a fantasy around a product and what it can do for a consumer, often aligning itself with the personal and social appeal that comes with lifestyle advertising. Having said that, since fantasy is not rooted in reality, it gives the consumer the need to identify with something far bigger than oneself – the imagination – which is why they are so effective as an executional style of advertising.

A good example of this kind of advertising is the Lynx adverts for deodorant. Lynx initially enjoyed huge success from its controversial ‘Lynx Effect’ campaigns, usually showing women chasing a man who had used Lynx. These adverts were initially broadcasted in the late 1990s, with the most notable one being aired in 2006.

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