Profitable methods for small business advertising.

Profitable Methods for Small Business Advertising

In the preface, the author states, "This book will equip you to set directions that will lead to the costefficient, profit-producing advertising you want for your company.' The "equip' stage is set by specifying concrete goals for advertising,

such as "increasing overall share of market by X percent.' Gray gives the reader enouragement that advertising will work for every small business, regardless of its nature, size, or target market. Selling to professionals, he says, is similar to selling to the general public. His consistent message is to use the business's assets as communicated in the central selling message through advertising to achieve the firm's goals. Twenty brief success cases show just how profitable advertising can be.

Because this book makes an effort to appeal to all businesses, it is unclear just which readers might benefit most. A professional who wants to market his or her business might find a more focused approach, such as Marketing Professional Services by Edward W. Wheatley (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1983) to be more useful. The owner of a very small business--a sole proprietorship or a business with one to twenty-five employees--may find a non-technical approach such as Randy Baca Smith's Setting Up Shop (McGraw-Hill, Warner Books, 1982) to be more helpful. A business person looking for a how-to approach might appreciate Michael Anthony's Handbook of Small Business Advertising (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, Mass., 1981) or Dennis H. Tootelian and Ralph M. Gaedeke, Small Business Management: Operations and Profiles (Scott, Foresman and Company, Glenview, Ill., 1985).

Profitable Methods for Small Business Advertising does present an overview of the major types of advertising available, however, and provides many good hints and guidelines which draw richly on the author's years of experience in advertising. As a resource book which also includes a section, "Helpful Resources,' the book is a useful source of information for a small businessperson about the area of advertising.

Certainly the value of advertising is convincingly expressed in this book. However, the author does not point out the place of advertising in the overall marketing scheme, and he does not mention other ways of marketing one's products or services. In addition, several of the case "success stories' feature an advertising agency which is responsible for the successful campaign, but a number of questions about the use of advertising agencies remain unanswered. When do you need one? How do you find one? How much does it cost? How do you deal with one? These are minor flaws, however, and Profitable Methods for Small Business Advertising should be useful to many practitioners and as supplementary reading for advertising courses.