Does advertising only work via driving intentions and preference ? No!

Apart from a very small amount of direct response advertising, advertising works (to generate sales) through memories.  This is an uncontroversial statement, yet it’s common for marketers and academics to forget the essential role of memory and instead think advertising works largely through persuasive, rational or emotional, arguments that shift brand evaluations.

The dominant way that advertising works is by refreshing, and occasionally building, memory structures that improve the chance of the brand being recalled and/or noticed in buying situations and hence bought.  Memory structures such as what the brand does, what it looks like, where it’s available, when it’s consumed, where it is consumed, by who, with whom and so on.  Associations with cues that can bring the brand to mind.

Some advertising creates a purchase intention, gaining a reaction like “I should buy that” or “that’s interesting, I must check that out”.  It’s commonly assumed that such advertising must be more sales effective, but this does not follow. 

Do TV commercials need a USP ?

The answer would appear to be no, given that much advertising does not even make the slightest attempt at saying the brand is better than others.  But a fair amount of advertising does – so is this particularly good advertising ?  Does it work better ?

David Stewart, a Professor at University of Southern California, has published several important large content analyses of TV advertising.  The 1980s US TV ads (more than 2000)  were analysed

A problem with ad awareness norms to assess advertising quality

It is now common for market research agencies to promise their clients norms against which they can compare their advertising campaign.  For example, they might report…

“The new campaign for Fabulo achieved 37% ad awareness, this compares well to the average of 31% for new campaigns after 3 weeks”.

This sounds like good practice, but the norm is meaningless.

Better yet the research agency might compare against campaigns in a particular product category, or adjust for a particular GRP/TARP weight.  But this still isn’t good enough, GRPs (Gross Rating Points) tell us nothing about the reach and frequency of the campaign.

Worse still the metric confounds both media strategy effects and advertisement quality effects.  What is really needed is measurement immediately after the ad goes into the market, just of those consumers who had a potential exposure (OTS).  This can measure the ability of the advertisement to cut through and impact on memory structures, i.e. assess the quality of the advertisement live in-market.  Only then, when you know if the ad itself is working well or not, can you later use ad awareness metrics to evaluate the media strategy.

Do different awareness measures measure the same thing ?

There is a history of discussion amongst marketers about the relative merits and meaning of different awareness measures. Then in 1995 an article was published that appeared to lay all this debate to rest:

Laurent, Gilles, Jean-Noel Kapferer, and Francoise Roussel (1995), “The Underlying Structure of Brand Awareness Scores,” Marketing Science, 14 (No. 3, Part 2), G170-G79.

Gilles Laurent and colleagues appeared to show that different brand awareness measures were systematically related, simply reflecting different levels of difficulty for respondents (i.e. brand prompted being easier than unprompted). So the different measures all tapped one construct, and a score on one measure could be used to accurately predict a score on another measure. We thought that was an incredibly important and practical finding. However, not was all that it seemed.

Nearly a decade later we replicated this research, and extended it to ad awareness. We achieved the same empirical results, but in doing so we were able to more clearly see what the previous research had, and had not, found. The measures tend to vary together, brand to brand, because some brands are much larger and more salient than others, so all their awareness metrics are higher too. However, we also examined the relationships between the loyalty metrics for each brand over time. Contrary to Laurent’s conclusion we empirically found that it isn’t possible to use their model to predict a brand’s score on one metric from its score on another.

So while all these brand awareness measures share something in common they do not perfectly tap one underlying construct. That’s as important a finding as Laurent’s might have been (if it had turned out to be true). Different awareness measures measure (somewhat) different things, even if they are all loosely related to the brand’s overall salience (and market share).

Romaniuk, Jenni, Byron Sharp, Samantha Paech, and Carl Driesener (2004) “Brand and advertising awareness: A replication and extension of a known empirical generalisation” Australasian Marketing Journal, 12 (3), 70-80.

The concept of brand awareness has been hijacked by poor measures

When marketers first came up with the very worthy concept of brand awareness they were thinking, obviously, about the number of consumers who know the brand. Intuitively you would measure this by showing it to consumers and asking them if they are familiar with it. But last century this was expensive, phone surveys were cost effective but the brand couldn’t be shown (and printing pictures in mail surveys was expensive).

So rapidly the measures of brand awareness became verbal/written product category prompts, e.g. “what brands of fabric conditioner are you aware of ?” The problem with this type of measure is that it doesn’t really fit the concept. This measure doesn’t so much measure awareness as association of the brand with the product category cue. It also assumes that consumers can remember and say or write the brand name.