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Advertising Research - Summary Criteria used in copy testing can be usefully grouped into four types: recognition, recall, persuasion, and behavior. BRC uses mail questionnaires to measure television commercial recognition and brand name association. Communicus for television and Starch for print ads use personal interviews. Day-after-recall is widely used but controversial because of its inability to predict persuasion or behavior, especially for emotional appeals. Persuasion has been measured in forced exposure or on-air contexts, by change in brand preference, change in prize list brand preference, comparison of the effect on brand preference with a nonexposed control group, measures of advertisement involvement and brand commitment, and measures tailored to particular advertising objectives. Behavior measures include coupon stimulated buying after a forced exposure to an ad and scanner-based monitoring of a panelist in a split-cable testing operation. Copy test validity concern...

Advertising Research - Media Research In evaluating a particular media alternative such as Time magazine or "Dynasty, " it is necessary to know how many advertising exposures it will deliv- 23Ibid. er and what will be the characteristics of the audience. A first cut of the vehicle's value is the cost per thousand, the size of the audience divided by the advertisement insertion cost. Measuring Print Vehicle Audiences Print vehicle circulation data is easily obtained, but neglects pass-along readers both inside and outside the home. Thus, to measure a vehicle's audience, it is necessary to apply approaches such as recent-reading, reading-habit, and through-the-book to a randomly selected population sample. In the recent-reading method, a respondent is asked whether he or she looked at a copy within the past week for a wTeekly publication, or during the last month for a monthly publication. One problem is that the survey is unlikely to represent an average w...

Advertising Research - Budget Decision Providing analytical, research based judgments as to the optimal advertising budget is surprisingly difficult. However, there are research inputs that can be helpful. Tracking studies that show the advertising is either surpassing or failing to reach communication objectives can suggest that the budget should either be reduced or increased. Forced exposure testing of multiple exposures can suggest the optimal number of exposures per month for an audience member. Such a number can help guide the establishment of an advertising budget. More direct approaches include regression analysis of internal sales and advertising data, field experimentation, and split-cable experimentation. Regression Analysis A direct approach is to use internal data of advertising and sales over time, or perhaps over geographically defined sales regions, or perhaps both. The challenge is to explain sales movements using advertising as an independent variable. The re...

Advertising Research - Diagnostic Testing A whole category of advertising research methods are primarily designed not to test the impact of a total ad but rather to help creative people understand how the parts of the ad contribute to its impact. Which are weak and how do they interact? Most of these approaches can be applied to mock-ups of proposed ads as well as finished ads. 17The TEC Audit, TEC Measures, Inc. New York, NY. Qualitative Research Focus-group research is widely used at the front end of the development of an advertising campaign. In one study of the techniques used by 112 (out of 150 surveyed) of the top advertisers and agencies, focus groups were used 96 percent of the time to generate ideas for advertisements, and 69 percent of the time to test reactions to rough executions.18 In such groups, people will discuss their opinions about the product and the brand, their use experiences, and their reaction to potential advertisement concepts and actual advertiseme...

Advertising Research - Tracking Studies When a campaign is running its impact is often monitored via a tracking study. Periodic sampling of the target audience provides a time trend of measures of interest. The purpose is to evaluate and reassess the advertising campaign, and perhaps also to understand why it is or is not working. Among the measures that are often traced are advertisement awareness, awareness of elements of the advertisement, brand awareness, beliefs about brand attributes, brand image, occasions of use, and brand preference. Of particular interest is knowing how the campaign is affecting the brand as opposed to how the advertisement is communicating. Figure 23-5 shows the tracking of an advertising campaign directed at children for a beverage product.16 Personal interviews were held with children from 6 to 12 years old. They were shown visual stimuli such as pictures of brand packaging or line drawings of advertising characters. The mostly open-ended questions we...

Advertising Research - Copy Test Validity The copy test validity refers to its ability to predict advertising response. Figure 23-4 provides an overview of some of the important ways in which copy tests can differ. Each dimension involves validity issues and trade-offs with cost. There follows a discussion of several important considerations involved in evaluating validity. Advertisement Used One issue is whether a rough mock-up of an ad or a finished ad is used. Several copy test firms have reported high correlations with mock-up measures and finished copy measures. The seriousness of the problem will depend on the difference between the mock-up and the finished commercial and the impact of this difference on audience response. For example, it is very difficult to test humor in rough form. Another issue is the frequency of response. To what extent can a copy test predict the response to a campaign that will involve dozens or even hundreds of exposures? Can a single exposure pro...

Advertising Research - Purchase Behavior Coupon Stimulated Purchasing In the Tele-Research approach, 600 shoppers are intercepted in a shopping center location, usually in Los Angeles, and randomly assigned to test or control groups. The test group is exposed to five television or radio commercials or six print ads. Around 250 subjects in the test group completes a questionnaire on the commercial. Both groups are given a customer code number and a packet of coupons, including one for the test brand, which 15Winters, op. cit., 28. can be redeemed in a nearby cooperating drugstore or supermarket. Selling effectiveness score is the ratio of purchases by viewer shoppers divided by the rate of purchases by control shoppers. Purchases are tracked by scanner data. While the exposure context is highly artificial, the purchase choice is relatively realistic in that real money is spent in a real store. Split-Cable Tests Information Resources Inc.'s (IRI) BehaviorScan is one of se...

Advertising Research - Persuasion Forced Exposure Brand Preference Change Theater testing, pioneered by Horace Schwerin and Paul Lazarsfeld in the 1950s and briefly described in Chapter 10, is now done by McCollum/ Spielman, ASI, and ARS.6 The McCollum/Spielman test uses a 450 person sample spread over four geographically dispersed locations.7 In forced exposure tests, the respondents are recruited by telephone to come to a central location in order to preview television programming. Seated in groups of 25 in front of television monitors, they respond to a set of demographic and brand/product usage questions that appear on the screen. The respondents view a half-hour variety program featuring four professional performers. At the midpoint in the program seven commercials including four test commercials are shown. Performer Performer T C T C T C T Performer Performer A B 1 2 3 4 C D C = constant commercials T = test commercials After audience reactions to ...

Advertising Research - Advertising Research - Recall Day-After-Recall (DAR) The DAR (day-after-recall) measure of a television commercial, first used in the early 1940s by George Gallup, then with Young & Rubican, is closely associated with Burke Marketing Research.3 "How did the ad Burke out?" is a common question. The procedure is to telephone 150 to 300 program viewers the day after a television commercial appears. They are asked if they can recall any commercials the previous day for a particular brand.They are then asked for anything they can recall about the commercial, what was said, what was shown, and what the main idea was. DAR is the percent of those in the commercial audience, who were watching the show before and after the commercial was shown, who recalled something specific about the commercial such as the sales message, the story line, the plot, or some visual or audio element. The DAR is an "on-air" test in that the commercial exposure occu...

Advertising Research - Recognition One level of testing is whether a respondent can recognize the advertisement as one that he or she has seen before. An example of recognition testing is the Bruzzone Research Company (BRC) tests by mail of television commercials.1 Questionnaires, such as the one shown in Figure 23-1, are mailed to 1000 households. The sample is drawn from the Donneley list of all households that either have a registered automobile or a listed telephone. Interest in the subject matter and a dollar bill payment usually generates a sample of 500. The recognition question is shown at the top. At the bottom is the brand association question, a critical dimension of most campaigns. On the average 60 percent recognize the commercial and 73 percent of these can correctly select the correct brand from the list of three. Test—retest correlations of .98 have been reported.  Another firm, Communicus, determines similar recognition measures of both television and radio co...

Advertising Research Roger is the product manager for King Cola, a product with a $22 million media budget. Last year half was spent on television, 30 percent in magazines and the rest was used to support retailer newspaper advertising. Roger, like most product managers, will need research help to set advertising objectives and to make three types of tactical advertising decisions that are the focus of this chapter: the creative decision, the budget decision, and the media decision. Setting advertising objectives involves a host of questions. How should the brand be positioned? Should taste or a fun, active use experience be emphasized? What should the target audience be? Should the focus be on attracting new customers or keeping old ones? Is there a brand awareness problem? Almost any research that provides insights into the market, customer motivation, and brand performance will help to set objectives. Much of advertising research is termed copy-testing and is directed at the c...

Forecasting - Summary There is a set of qualitative approaches to forecasting that includes the jury of executive opinion, the salesforce estimates, the survey of customer intentions, and the Delphi approach. These approaches are fast, inexpensive, flexible, and can integrate large quantities of information. They are extremely sensitive and can be used for difficult forecasting tasks such as long-range forecasting and forecasting turning points. They suffer from the biases, uncertainties, and inconsistencies inherent in the subjective judgments used. Time-series forecasting, the projection of historical data, is well-suited to short-term forecasts of data containing a clear trend or seasonal or cyclical patterns. It is not capable of forecasting turning points where the environment changes. One decision in time-series analysis is how much historical data to use and how much reliance to place on older data. Causal models refer to the introduction of factors that directly or indir...

Forecasting - Causal Models Time-series approaches are limited by their simplistic assumption that the future will be the same as the past. Time-series approaches use only historical data on the variable to be forecasted. Causal models refer to the introduction into the analysis of factors that are hypothesized to cause or influence, either directly or indirectly, the object of the forecast. Thus, if forecasting transit usage is the goal, such causal factors as population growth, the price of gasoline, and frequency of service might be introduced as factors that might cause or influence transit usage. There are at least three reasons for moving to a causal analysis. First, time-series analyses usually cannot predict turning points and thus are incapable of forecasting accurately at times when an accurate forecast is most needed. If causal factors can be identified and linked to the forecast, then they can be used to help predict turning points. Actually, some of the qualitative tec...

Forecasting - Time-Series Extrapolation A reasonable approach to forecasting is simply to extrapolate historical data forward. This approach, termed time-series forecasting, can be very effective, especially for short-term forecasting. A time-series is simply data collected over time, such as weekly sales data for three years. Three factors must be present for time-series forecasting to be appropriate. First, time-series data must exist. Without reliable past data there is nothing to extrapolate. Second, the future must be like the past, at least with respect to forces influencing the time-series. Since past data are being extrapolated forward, any environmental change influencing the time series can make the extrapolation err. In particular, a time-series forecast has little ability to forecast "turning points," where the rate of growth or decline of the time-series will change significantly. Thus, time-series forecasting is best suited in rather stable situations and fo...

Forecasting - Qualitative Methods Time-series and causal-model approaches to forecasting both require an analysis of past data. In contrast, qualitative techniques are based on the subjective judgments of individuals. Of course, the individuals may have access to quantitative information about the past, but the judgments themselves are subjective summaries or distillations of all the knowledge that is relevant to the forecast. Jury of Executive Opinion This approach involves combining the judgments of a group of managers about the forecast. The group normally would include a variety of concerned and informed managers representing such functioned areas as marketing, sales, operations, manufacturing, purchasing, accounting, and finance. They each would bring to the forecast a different background, perspective, and set of biases. Often their judgments would be supported by background information that might include past data, economic and industry developments, competitive actions,...

Forecasting Peter, an aggressive product manager for the widget product line for XYZ Electronics, was in a management meeting. The topic for discussion was his last quarterly sales forecast. It was only half of what sales actually had been, and as a result the manufacturing manager, Mary, needed to run the plan on overtime for six weeks after laying off people during the previous quarter. The controller, Charlie, was upset over the large fluctuations in the inventory level, and the general manager, George, recalled the order they bid below cost because of projected undercapacity. They were all discussing Peter's low forecast. Mary:    You are always low and wrong. Where do those numbers come from anyway, a random number table? Peter:    They come from the salesforce, who are on top of the market. You must realize that they don't like to put speculative orders into their forecast because they look bad if forecasted sales do not materialize. Because of that I act...

New Product Research - Summary The first stage in new-product research is concept generation, which involves research first to identify needs and second to identify concepts that will be responsive to those needs. The second stage is concept evaluation and development, getting relevant people's reactions to concepts. The purpose is usually to help make a judgment as to whether to proceed and to suggest some directions in the subsequent development phase. The exposure is based on a concept description, which should include the elements of the marketing program (such as price) that are critical to concept acceptance. The third stage is product evaluation and development, where a more realistic product exposure is possible because the product and much of the marketing program have been developed. In particular, the product will be available for use tests, where potential customers try it and provide reactions. Such use tests are used to predict product acceptance and repeat purc...

New Product Research - Test Marketing In terms of providing a realistic evaluation of a marketing program, there is no substitute for conducting an experiment in which the marketing program (or perhaps several versions of it) are implemented in a limited but carefully selected part of the market. The impact of the total marketing program, with all its interdependencies, is determined then in the market context as opposed to the artificial context associated with the concept and product tests that have been discussed. There are two primary functions of test marketing. The first is to gain information and experience with the marketing program before making a total commitment to it. The second is to predict the program's outcome when it is applied to the total market. The test market fulfills the first function by being a pilot operation for the marketing program, just as a pilot production facility might serve to debug a manufacturing process. There are all sorts of possible an...