Many advertisers want many things. Advertising is multi-faceted. To be effective, advertising programmes need to be specific in their goals, specific in their audiences and specific in their means. Out of a myriad of effects, advertising can particularly help in the following areas:

- To create awareness: it can help to make things known. On the whole, people do not deal with things they have never heard of, or they prefer not to.

- To create or develop favourable attitudes: it can help to foster a positive view of the product or service.

- To develop a brand identity: advertising can help invest a product with a special image or characteristic.

- To position a product in a market: where a market is segmented, advertising can help position a product with a particular segment and identify with it. Rolls-Royce and Mini cars occupy different segments. Their communication reflects this and maximises this.

- To sustain relationships: it is a force to build and strengthen producer–customer relationships over time.

- To persuade: advertising puts up a case for the customer to be attracted to the product on offer.

- To create demand: Häagen Dazs or McDonald’s. Communication makes the product seem desirable, worthwhile and attainable.

- To build up enquiries: often advertising is a bridge between the product and a sales call. Its function is to obtain enquiries: for a sales call, or for literature, or for a sample, or for a price estimate.

- To support distributors: where there is a distributive chain, the distributor may require reinforcement in the local marketplace. Advertising is one of the forces that can supply this.

- To sustain the organisation: a company may need to consolidate, or re-establish, or explain or reposition or rebuild relationships. It wishes to strengthen old friends or build new ones. Here advertising may have a strong corporate role.

- To launch new products: advertising is a key weapon in the battery of services used to launch products into the marketplace.

- To offset competition: one characteristic of the recent past has been the growth of the market concept. Another is the growth of the brand. A third feature is the growth of competitive activity. As markets grow so usually does competition. Few markets remain monopolies. As the customer remains sovereign, and a multiplicity of suppliers arise to serve him or her, so competitive activity accelerates.

A prime example of this is telecommunications. From a simple monopoly producer with a short range of products has emerged a spread of suppliers and a cornucopia of services. Competition is the norm. Advertising helps meet competitors and match competitors, by persuading the customer or providing a counter-claim. In an increasingly competitive world, suppliers must advertise to protect themselves against primary competition, and sometimes against other categories of product too.

- To help provide a point of difference: people do not favour ‘me-too’ products. The brand needs a difference, a unique personality, a point of interest, a feature which will isolate it from a multitude of others. Brands sell differences, or ‘product pluses’. These can be powerfully conveyed through advertising. Guinness is not a brown stout: it is a unique, mystical beverage. Martini is not just another vermouth: it is a sophisticated, superior substance in its own right. Differences are of emotion, or style, or status as well as of product specification.