Read the following passage and answer the question.

Safex Ltd is a company manufacturing masks. The newly appointed marketing manager of the firm has taken 'Covid Pandemic' as an opportunity to increase sales. He used a combination of tools to achieve its communication objective. He constituted 4 teams for designing these tools.

Team 1 :- The tool used by them was an impersonal form of communication which was paid for.

Team 2 :- The tool used by them involves oral presentation of message in the form of conversation with one or more prospective customers for the purpose of making sales

Team 3 :- This team used short-term incentives which were designed to encourage the buyers to make immediate purchase.

Team 4 :- This team used a non-personal form of communication which was non-paid.

All the teams successfully designed their tools and achieved their desired results.

The tool used by Team 4 is ___________

Publicity

The correct answer is option (3)- Publicity.

The tool used by Team 4 is Publicity.

Publicity is similar to advertising, in the sense that it is a non-personal form of communication. However, as against advertising it is a nonpaid form of communication. Publicity generally takes place when favourable news is presented in the mass media about a product or service. For example, if a manufacturer achieves a breakthrough by developing a car engine, which runs on water instead of petrol, and this news is covered by television or radio or newspapers in the form of a news item. It would be termed as publicity because the engine manufacturer would benefit from such dissemination of information about its achievement by the media but would not bear any cost for the same. Thus, the two important features of publicity are that:
(i) Publicity is an unpaid form of communication. It does not involve any direct expenditure by the marketing firm; and
(ii) There is no identified sponsor for the communication as the message goes as a news item.
In publicity, as the information is disseminated by an independent source, e.g., the press in the form of news stories and features, the message has more credibility than if that comes as a sponsored message in advertising.