Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [11]
• Convenience samples (e.g., students or customers in mall intercepts: that is, those approached while on shopping expeditions) are used as subjects in nearly all studies.
• Subjects try to help researchers confirm their hypotheses.
• Some studies are too old.
• Most findings are just common sense.
In Appendix A, I explain why you should ignore these arguments.
However, keep the following in mind. First, only a small percentage of relevant studies in advertising look at behavior, and, second, many advertising studies are one-shot efforts. That is, they have not been replicated or extended.
Why do so many advertisers ignore the research on advertising? Here are some valid concerns:
• Relevance: Even if advertisers have easy access to a research library, they must comb through a vast body of literature to identify useful findings. To make matters worse—as I found in preparing this book—probably less than 5 percent of journal articles on advertising contain useful findings.
• Replication: Only a small percentage of the studies in advertising have been replicated, thus posing a question about their reliability. For that reason, Persuasive Advertising relies primarily on studies that have been replicated. Fortunately, given the thousands of published studies, there were many studies that were replicated or extended.
• Bafflegab: Many academics write in a manner that is nearly incomprehensible. Thus, many relevant studies needed to be “translated.”
There are good reasons then, that advertisers have not capitalized on the extremely valuable evidence that has been accumulated.
In this book, my aim is to provide easy access to the world’s storehouse of empirically validated knowledge on how to persuade through advertising.
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1 Used with the kind permission of P&G.
Conditions
In the late 1800s, John E. Powers, a noted advertiser, recognized the importance of conditions—although he did not specify them. He said an appeal that worked well for one advertiser in a given situation might fail when used by another advertiser. For example, one would not use the same appeal for inexpensive grocery items as for high-priced goods valued for their workmanship. This book provides enough detail about the conditions to permit the reader to apply principles sensibly, whatever the circumstances happen to be.
Principles are action steps to be taken under given conditions. Conditions refer to the way in which one describes and defines the advertising problem being considered. This includes issues such as the objectives of the campaign, the nature of the product, and the target market.
Experts have often provided advertising principles that they claimed apply in all situations. Example: “Do not use humor in advertising.” In fact, principles that apply to all situations are rare—and humor is no exception.
Experts criticized Apple’s “1984” ad, perhaps the most famous TV ad, for violating many guidelines such failing to identify the brand early. But when I rated the commercial using the principles in this book, the actions were consistent with the conditions. For example, because there was extensive media coverage leading up to the airing of the commercial, there was no need to mention the brand name early in the commercial.
The task of identifying the conditions for each principle was difficult because academic researchers often fail to describe conditions. This is not unique to studies of advertising: In a study of 1,700 empirical papers in six leading marketing journals from 1984 to 1999, we found that only 11 percent had hypotheses that included conditions (Armstrong, Brodie, and Parsons 2001). Fortunately for the purposes of this book, it was often possible to infer conditions.
Some conditions are necessary—otherwise the principle does not apply. For example, “Provide news, but only if it is real.” In such cases, the condition is stated as part of the principle. A helpful