Effective communication is essential for building a strong brand. A good marketing campaign can literally sell anything and almost everything. A marketing text book even says that the real marketing is the ability to sell ice to Eskimos by making them realize that they actually needed to buy ice.

However, there’s one major limitation to the power of advertising. A marketer’s ability is limited to generating trial only – there are more factors also responsible for bringing the repeat purchase. Most importantly, the brand must deliver on the brand promise made by the marketer.

The role of advertising varies from brand to brand depending upon the nature of the product/service. The products with strong functional benefits will be less influenced by the power of communication and the products that bring emotional and non-functional benefits obviously will be more influenced by the effectiveness of advertising.

For commercial product/service brands, effective Brand building is instead a function of 4 P’s of marketing and importance of each P varies depending on the nature of the product/service being marketed.