Advertising is a quite complicated science about promoting products and providing brands and companies with ways of communicating with their customers.  It is not as simple as some people may think.  Even though creativity is crucial for advertising and it is the main product that advertising agencies sell, alone it is not able to achieve the set goals and largely influence the product promotion.  Apart from creativity, advertising requires much planning and developing a good strategy.  Advertising is sort of a combination of creativity and calculation.

Advertising strategies cannot be developed or grounded on the waste land. There have to be ideas, inspiration or traditions that would help it to get formed and would stand behind it.

There are three categories in advertising, and all advertising strategies of companies and brands fall under one of these categories depending on whether they are based on ideas, territory, or values.  For example, Orangina and Head & Shoulders belong to the first category since their advertising campaigns are based on the ideas, Levi's and Marlboro base their strategies upon the concept of a territory, and Nike uses a value as a foundation of advertising campaigns.

Marlboro invites its consumers to visit "the land of taste".  Their advertising campaign is based on the concept of a territory.

Territory, by definition, is a land under some sort of authority. In advertising territory means a symbol that marks brands and products.  Territory is where they belong, where they come from. Like case of Marlboro, cigarettes belong to the land of Marlboro cowboy, the land of freedom, masculine valor and adventures.  Such image adds extra value to the product, makes it a part of life of those people whose ideals are alike to Marlboro's.

In terms of advertising, brands claim some territory of sense, feeling or history they want their products to be associated with. It adds them extra imaginative value in the eyes of customers. Such territories can be found for many different products and, especially, for cosmetics or perfumes. Those can claim territories of feeling, eroticism, dream, seduction, escape or surrealism and many others.

There is one more example of how discovering a territory can change the life of a brand.

In 1961 P&G has bought the soap brand Monsavon from L'Oreal, France. Some ten years later the company stopped investing into this brand and its market share went down to two percents. Then one of the managers offered to return to the original package and style of this soap. They were very simple.  At the beginning Monsavon was simply a soap and nothing more, but a soap of good quality.  Simplicity and good care of skin became the main advertising promise once again when the brand came back to the original territory of simplicity and reclaimed it.  Monsavon today is the leader of the market, and its sales have immensely increased.

These are only a few examples of how finding and claiming the right territory can affect the commercial life of the brand. This territory has to be not only positioned well and be important to customers.  It must also be able to provide your brand a dominating position on the market.