Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [4]
Management is far behind medicine. Managers rely on gut feelings and experience rather than evidence. This applies especially to advertising. Randall Rothenberg, an advertising expert at Booz Allen Hamilton (personal communication, December 14, 2006), wrote that, “Having spent the past seven years in management consulting, I’ve found myself stunned by the degree to which agencies’ continual search for ‘the new’ has them ignore otherwise articulated bodies of knowledge.”
Although an enormous amount of useful research has been produced in management, it has not been translated into useful principles, or even into plain English. However, after a century-long accumulation of empirical knowledge—and the advent of the Internet—management is able to begin the transition to comprehensible evidence-based principles. By increasing the attention to evidence-based findings, Persuasive Advertising seeks to advance the science of advertising.
Formulating the principles
In formulating the principles, I used the systems approach. That is, I am interested in seeing how a principle affects not only the seller, but also the buyer and other stakeholders. In addition, I am concerned about long-term implications. For example, deceptive practices may be profitable in the short run but are unlikely to be profitable in the long run. Conversely, short-run practices that lose money, such as making good on guarantees, might be profitable in the longer run. In other words, because I used the systems approach in the formulation of evidence-based principles, they offer opportunities for advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their advertising in delivering long-term benefits for sellers and customers.
Ideally, principles should apply across time and space. Does anybody believe that because Newton’s law of gravity was discovered long ago it is irrelevant today, or that because the discovery occurred in England it does not apply in the United States? The principles in this book are drawn from research conducted over more than a century and in many countries. Dave Walker, who has conducted statistical analyses of advertisements worldwide, has concluded that the principles he has examined apply across countries (Walker 2008).
Basic books in a field should summarize the principles for that field. In the social sciences, however, they rarely do, even when they claim to have done so. For example, we (Armstrong & Schultz 1993) examined nine basic marketing textbooks, published between 1927 and 1989, to determine whether they contained useful marketing principles. Some of the book titles included the word “principles.” Four doctoral students acted as coders and found 566 principles related to product, price, place, or promotion. None of these principles was supported by empirical evidence. Four raters agreed that only 20 of these 566 principles were meaningful. Twenty marketing professors rated the 20 meaningful principles as to whether they were correct, supported by empirical evidence, useful, and surprising; none met all the criteria. Finally, the professors judged nine of the 20 principles to be nearly as correct when their wording was reversed.
The evidence presented in Persuasive Advertising is drawn from about 640 papers and 50 books. These sources were themselves based on prior publications. There were 33 meta-analyses covering almost 1,800 studies. There were also many traditional reviews citing hundreds of studies. In all then, Persuasive Advertising rests on a foundation of approximately 3,000 research sources.
The studies were conducted in the fields of accounting, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, consumer behavior, language, law, marketing, mass communication, organizational behavior, politics, propaganda, social psychology, and public opinion. This search for evidence was aided by excellent books including the following:
Books summarizing research findings
Cialdini (2009), Influence
Dillard and Pfau (2002), The Persuasion Handbook
Levine (2003), The Power