Measuring Advertising Effectiveness Essay

Introduction

Advertising is all about influencing people through adopting effective communication processes, therefore, there is no concern about being right or wrong in advertising theory. Although a goal of advertising is often to increase sales, the manner in which this goal is pursued is often via social influence attempts directed at attitudes. Advertising is typically concerned with the formation of positive attitudes toward the specific product under the assumption that such information or change will prompt corresponding behavior (Mitchell, 1993, p. 119). However, apprehension develops when advertising influences the order in which we evoke or notice the alternatives we consider. This does not feel like advertising is persuasion neither it is effective. However the notion is true that no advertising theory fits the marketing communication rule and therefore instead of persuasion and other major effects, the theory persuades us to look for ‘feathers’, or minor effects which can tip the balance when alternative brands are otherwise equal and, through repetition, can grow imperceptibly by small increments over time (Sylvester, 2000, p. 24).

The British advertising marketplace understands the particular balance between consumer behavior and advertising effects. Britain’s advertising industry while taking into account all the global homogenization stress unique characteristics for organizational innovation and technical specialization each time it prepares an ad campaign (Pratt, 2004). However British advertising apart from the market research does not forget the role ‘creativity’ plays ineffective advertising. Despite all the measures, there are no hard and fast rules that take the ad to the extent where the customer changes his behavior.

Advertising is an integral part of ‘free-market’ economies that enables consumers and buyers to locate and compare brands and to understand distinctions and innovations among proliferating product offerings play a vital role in helping to inform purchase decisions. The UK advertising industry has a social role that connects persons with products, perceptions with images of well-being, reaching into customer personal concerns about personal identity, interpersonal relationships, happiness, affluence, stereotypes, sex roles, cultural traditions, persuasion, personal autonomy, and the role of business in society (Varey, 2001, p. 269). Advertising of this century is not a conveyor of information and persuasive messages but is a massive and pervasive industry that provides us with affordability and great prominence in our lives thereby providing social communication.

According to Gabriel and Lang (1995) most of the advertising that comes to our way allure us to form a ‘come and get me’ attitude, but ignores the other part of the bargain, the obligation to pay (Gabriel and Lang, 1995). Therefore the market, and its commercial advertising, is not primarily a ‘want satisfying mechanism: it is a ‘want creating mechanism. Blythe (2000) possesses a contradictory opinion that distinguishes advertising that is wanted by consumers because it is useful to them from advertisers’ efforts to attract attention. Furthermore, he suggests that classified advertising is better as it helps people to find the products they want, whereas display advertisements distract in order to attract.

The Language of Advertising

Tanaka (1994) writes the way in which Williamson has nearly stumbled on the fact that advertising messages are not fully encoded and that interpreting advertisements takes more than just decoding (Tanaka, 1994, p. 5). Advertising requires the audience to make appropriate connections and for communication to succeed, the audience must be involved in carrying out a task of processing, and that there is a gap between the message which is obtained by decoding and the message which the audience actually recovers.

Covert communication can also appeal to what is only a slightly less ‘basic’ instinct in human beings, namely arrogance. Perfume advertisements serve as a good example of this, as perfume is a luxury good closely associated with wealth and status. In the past disputes over discounts on perfume offered at cut-price pharmaceutical chain stores in Britain showed that the high price of perfumes is part of their prestige. Therefore the intrinsic worth of perfumes, in terms of costs of production, is greatly inflated by artificially induced scarcity and price manipulation.

Advertising Characteristics

Advertisements are subtle, diverse, and complex phenomena that require detailed individual investigation for they are different when examined in terms of effects and effectiveness (Wells, 1997, p. 1). Advertising effects and advertising effectiveness are two different phenomena and cannot be evaluated in isolation. Advertisements uphold salient attributes of assigned products so that their targeted customers’ beliefs about these attributes will change or else they are influenced to the extent where the targeted consumer develops a changing attitude.

Changing consumer attitude

From the consumer point of view, one characteristic provides an opportunity for the product to change its customer’s attitude as it is commonly accepted that changes in beliefs lead to changes in attitude. Various researches have highlighted the changes that are attacked on the basis of consumer’s beliefs and relate these changes to attitude change. However substantial evidence has made us think that advertising can affect unattacked elements as well. For example, an effective ad may not only influence the target audience but also an audience that is loyal to some other product or being influenced by some other ad.

Changing consumer attitude is not the only concern of today’s advertising, but concerning consumer attitude with respect to globalization is the main apprehension, which has been taken as advertising ‘weakness’ in many parts of the world. For example when Eastern Europe, Russia, and China opened their markets to Western businesses, advertisers while detecting the opportunity into moving these markets transformed ad agencies into multinational agencies with international research and media-buying capabilities (Burnett, 2005, p. 23).

Effective communication

An effective ad also possesses the capability to change customer beliefs about aspects of a product not mentioned in the ad. Thus, advertisement is all about conveying a message about one attribute that can influence beliefs about other attributes. Skoda – which was concerned with corporate advertising was not only concerned about selling a specific product to a target market but due to its ‘effective creative skills of ridiculing people’ remained successful in changing the attitudes of those who thought they possessed poor cars (Yeshin, 2006, p. 28).

Effective communication takes place when advertisers target their niche markets, i.e., instead of marketing to the masses they target particular market segments. New technologies like new media and the Internet help advertisers to reach selected groups of consumers with selective media. Of course, ethical criteria are never ignored and consider ‘advocacy’ and ‘accuracy’ to persuade the audience to buy the products.

When critics talk about weak advertising that means ‘stereotyping’ which in ad terminology refers to the group of people that lacks individuality. That does not mean that advertising theory has gone weak, instead, it is the responsibility of the advertisers to become aware of different groups and the ways to portray them.

Cost-Effectiveness and the effect of advertising Repetition

The recent UK trend in the making of adverts, particularly TV ones have been general attempts to cut production costs. There was a time when most of the production functions were carried out in-house, today the’ runaway production’ technique is followed which is borrowed from filmmaking and is conducted in cheap locations to cut down the advertising cost. Since ad ‘effectiveness’ has been measured in terms of whether the cost of advertising is returned to the advertiser in the form of current or potential sales revenue, several authors have proposed using sales as the primary criterion. Practitioners are mostly interested in knowing whether ads create enough impact to warrant their cost; therefore their focus is on individual ads for individual brands (Wells, 1997, p. 22).

An advertising campaign does not succeed until and unless it achieves the trust of consumers and it is this convincing attitude of a campaign that is commonly adopted by marketers as a strategy to repeat simple product claims that we have heard on numerous occasions. Therefore, another impact that an effective ad upholds on its audience is the remembrance in the study of advertising effectiveness which concerns the effect of repetition on the consumer. Repeating an ad enhances consumer memory for the advertised brand and therefore when multiple exposures of the same ad are conducted, they increase positive attitude toward the advertised products.

Advertisement in attitude change situations

Brand attitude plays an important role in determining an individual’s evaluation of an advertisement, as measured by their attitude toward the advertisement. Under the supervision of considerable research directed at understanding the antecedents of attitude toward the ad and the relationship between attitude toward the ad and brand attitudes, today, most of the studies have examined advertising effects under attitude formation conditions and have examined the relationship between the mediators of attitude formation and change shortly after exposure to the advertisement (Mitchell, 1993, p. 209). This limits the two situations of the results. First, because of the notion that brand attitudes are measured immediately after exposure to the advertisement, it is possible that the effect of Ad on brand attitudes may be relatively minor or may even disappear entirely shortly after subjects leave the laboratory environment. Alternatively, the relationship between the individual’s attitude toward the advertisement and brand attitudes may change over time due to memory factors. Second, the role of these mediators, particularly Ad, may differ between attitude formation and attitude change situations. That is whether the ad would be able to influence the consumers or not, it must be memorable.

Consumer and Purchase Behaviour

The central concept behind advertising and branding is ‘marketing’ and behind understanding ‘consumer behaviour’ is exchange. The consumer behavior in context with the decision-making paradigm is a simple problem-solving and decision-making sequence, in which the cognitive consumer processes information, conducts comparative evaluation, and makes a rational selection (Varey, 2001, p. 45). Advertising pretesting must be based on the communication objectives for the advertised brand and that these, in turn, depend on the buyer decision process that the advertising is intended to influence. However, there are five primary communication effects that reshape advertising.

1. Category need in which the consumer makes the necessary realization of whether to purchase or not; he is in a situation of ‘need to purchase or not.
2. Brand awareness criteria in which the consumer’s ability to recognize or recall the brand, within the product category is enough to make a purchase decision.
3. The brand attitude helps the consumer to evaluate how well his selective brand can satisfy a relevant motive.
4. Brand purchase intention leads him to deliberately decide to purchase the brand or take purchase-related action within a given time period.
5. Brand purchase facilitation enables the consumer to make sure that other marketing factors, such as availability and ease of payment, will not hinder purchase.

Marketing strategy is the final plan that marketers utilize to guide their efforts to provide particular products to specified market segments through exchanges. On the other hand, communication strategy is the plan developed and used by marketing communication managers to provide the necessary communication environment for such exchanges to become possible and to be consummated by effective means like advertising. In between the two is consumer behavior, the basis of marketing.

For example, if we take the relationship between sports and mass media, we know that both enjoy a particular relationship where mass media, on one hand, is responsible for turning organized sports from a relatively minor element of culture into a full-blown social institution while on the other hand, sports has been the mode for bringing attention to new mass media forms of the public, which in turn have brought new sporting experiences. This relationship between the two has made both of them flourish (Lever & Wheeler, 1993). Both take advantage of each other’s presence, sports marketers use the media to target their messages at sports consumers, therefore sports marketing offers a form of narrowcasting, whereby a large group of consumers with common interests is brought together through sports events and programming (Fitch, 1986). However, one drawback that goes with sports marketing is that sports marketers have remained unable to clearly identify their consumers or their consumers’ specific media usage (Kahle & Riley, 2004, p. 4).

How consumer reacts to the advertisement?

Sentis and Markus (1986) argued that products and particular brands of products are represented by schemas in memory, and largely determine how the consumer reacts to advertising. Furthermore, they believe that people have cognitive schemas representing all of their beliefs and feelings about a brand or product (Clark et al, 1994, p. 174). Researchers have revealed that a brand’s schema is important for advertising because consumers will choose those products that match their self-perceptions. However, it is clear that people have self-schemas that may or may not conflict with the brand or product’s schema. Researchers like Cacioppo et al. (1982) found that subjects who were legal schematic rated legal messages as being particularly persuasive, whereas subjects who were religious schematic rated religious messages as being particularly persuasive.

The notion of some types and brands of products being better exemplars of a particular product schema than others is related directly to the literature concerning concepts and prototypes. Briefly, concepts are mental representations of classes i.e., consumer believes about the class of pets or tables. However, advertising concepts serve three primary functions that promote cognitive economy, make inferences beyond the available perceptual information, and form into more complex thoughts and concepts. Once exemplars of a particular concept used to have singly necessary and jointly properties, today it is acknowledged as properties that are different in different situations and contexts. For example, some exemplars are prototypical, in that they are good representatives of the concept, whereas other exemplars are fuzzy, in that they are rather poor representatives of the concept. We can also assume the reason why some products or brands of products are more prototypical of a given product category than others.

In a consumer setting, the appeal is between the recipient, the product, and the advertisement and the communication takes place with the help of the theory of schema correspondence that states that message persuasiveness is an increasing function of the fit between the schemas of these three elements, the attitude object, the appeal, and the recipient (Clark et al, 1994, p. 176).

Measuring Advertisement

Advertising measurement is normally developed in the context of a theory on how advertising ought to work as it is often said that it is different in different situations. Despite such believes, the advertisement operating model of research Systems Corporation has a particular rule for effective advertising. It suggests that to create a preference for the advertised brand in a manner that will be reflected in business results, worth the investment (Wells, 1997, p. 302). However, important issues in determining what measurement feedback is appropriate to lie in the validity of the criterion measurement on which advertising decisions are made.

The extent to which advertising effects in influencing sales has long plot researchers of two persuasions. First, advertising is a tool that triggers powerful means by which firms can inform consumers about their products. In this context, researchers have tried to find the optimum level of advertising for managers to achieve this goal. Secondly, the concern that at the same time, bothers public policymakers that advertising could have bad effects on the market, such as maintaining or increasing sales of inferior, more costly, or obsolete products.

Findings on the effectiveness of advertising and promotion arise from three groups of studies, field experiments of advertising effectiveness, analyzing aggregate historical data relating advertising and promotion to sales, and analyses of the effect of marketing variables on consumers’ choices of alternate brands (Clark et al, 1994, p. 55).

References

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Burnett John, Moriarty Sandra & Wells D. William, (2005) Advertising: Principles and Practice. Prentice-Hall.

Clark M. Eddie, Brock C. Timothy & Stewart W. David, (1994) Attention, Attitude and Affect in Response to Advertising: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, NJ.

Fitch, E. D. (1986, September 1). “Methods of keeping score for advertisers” In Advertising Age.

Gabriel Y. and Lang, T. (1995) The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation, London: Sage Publications.

Kahle R. Lynn & Riley Chris, (2004) Sports Marketing and the Psychology of Marketing Communication: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ.

Lever, J., & Wheeler, S. (1993). “Mass media and the experience of sport” In: Communication Research, 20(1), 125–143.

Mitchell A. Andrew, (1993) Advertising Exposure, Memory and Choice: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, NJ.

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