Image Attribution: “Advertisement Assignment” by Morgan Tinsley is licensed under CC0. (See interactive map)
Advertising Assignment
Terryl Atkins
Fall 2020
Morgan Tinsley
Advertising
The advertisement above is for an industrial fan that I purchased earlier this month. I purchased this product from Costco when I came to Kamloops, it sat at the front of one of the isles with one product sitting on top of the boxes so that people could test it. From what can be seen in the imagery and colour we can determine that it uses opposite colour schemes to bring the attention to the product. It uses a dark blue with white making a contrast and in the dark blue it has red as well as light blue to make them pop. However, with the text on the advertisement it does not try to convince the consumer to be like everyone else instead, it showcases what the product can do. In addition, the box that the product is in has the advertisement printed on it. Also, there is a French side and an English side, this is done because Canada is a bilingual country. On this box I only saw one case where it was slightly misleading/unclear, on this part it says “latest Fan Technology”. The reason why this is misleading/unclear is because it gives no reference to other companies creating dissimilar or similar products.
The use of a test product might have tipped me over the edge to buy it because it showed great promise and I usually like to be able to gain a little knowledge into the product that I am purchasing. That too was a marketing strategy by Costco to allow consumers to test the product in store allows for them to see the range of the product before they purchase it. This is what is known as product placement, it placed something that would grab the attention of consumers in the front of the store and gave a physical demo of the product to allow for consumers (like me) to be drawn towards. Adding on to this, the product itself is a bright colour (yellow) and compared to the usual office fans which are white, black or grey. This is another marketing strategy because they use colour to make their product stand out from the others on the market. In addition, the use of the product to advertise itself allows for a low cost for advertisers on other ways like billboards or posters in stores.