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In the early 1990s, changes in the economic policies opened
the doors for global competition and a new economic era
was begun. In the new era, the business houses started exploring
new modes of communication to strike a balance between speed
and cost in order to reach the target audience more effectively.
Advertising is a part of everyday life and can be considered
as the mirror as well as the maker of the culture—its
words and images reflect the present and the past. It helps
in stimulating demand for new products by communicating
relevant information and facts. It offers consumers a right
to choose by providing a variety of options in terms of
price, features and benefits. It creates an opportunity
for the consumers to take on the favorable viewpoints in
a promotional message. The main goal of an advertisement
is to widen the probability that a customer will buy a particular
product.
According to Chunawalla and Sethia (2003), advertising
is multidimensional and is a form of mass communication,
a powerful marketing tool, a component of the economic system,
a means of financing the mass media, a social institution,
an art form, an instrument of business management, a field
of employment and a profession. American Marketing Association
(1948) defined advertising as any paid form of non-personal
communication about an organization, product, service or
idea by an identified sponsor. Advertising is the non-personal
communication of marketing-related information to a target
audience, usually paid for by the advertiser and delivered
through mass media in order to reach the specific objectives
of the sponsor (Burnett, 1998).
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