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The communication objectives emerge from the analysis of the target market. In fact I would say that they sometimes could have an irreversible role to play in advertising. You should remember that no matter which stage of the campaign you might be in, looking at the objectives and subsequently the target market is an important means to be in touch with where your campaign is heading.

The quantitative research of consumers socio-economic and demographic conditions, user-status, use frequency, etc; along with the qualitative research of image analysis of the object in consumer’s perception goes a long way in setting communication objectives. Image I need to tell you is a set of beliefs, ideas and impressions that a person holds of an object. It is a precondition for any communication planning.

The familiarity of the target audience is first measured against the following scale:

• Never heard of
• Just heard
• Know a little
• Know fairly well
• Know very well

If most of the respondents tick the first two options, the communication objective would be to build awareness. Those who are familiar are tested for their attitudes towards the product:

• Very unfavorable
• Somewhat unfavorable
• Neutral
• Somewhat favorable
• Very favorable

Negative attitudes must be overcome before undertaking further promotion.Hence we could in addition say that, analyzing the image of a product in the mind of the consumer is a crucial step to bring about differentiation in the market place. This differentiation would help us in understanding the relevant target audience to be targeted at. For example in the case of Freedom bike from LML, we are looking at not only the bike loving community or an age group which is 18 +, but importantly we are targeting at the people who want their spirits to be free. The independent person is basically what we are looking at. Similarly the fair and lovely advertisement for example, previously and to an extent till date they were looking at targeting the girls who would get married if they use the fair & lovely fairness cream. Of course the advertisement came under much flak because it hurt the sentiments of the women who were of a darker complexion. As a result the next advertisement focused on the confident young woman who becomes a TV commentator despite all odds. So the point my dear student is that we have to understand the complete profile of the consumer before we can actually go on to make the target audience analysis.