Conjunctions and linking words, Essays (high school) of English Language

Download Conjunctions and linking words and more Essays (high school) English Language in PDF only on Docsity! University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Business - Papers Faculty of Business 2017 Methodological Guidelines for Advertising Research John R. Rossiter University of Wollongong, [email protected] Larry Percy Copenhagen Business School Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Publication Details Rossiter, J. R. & Percy, L. (2017). Methodological Guidelines for Advertising Research. Journal of Advertising, 46 (1), 71-82. Methodological Guidelines for Advertising Research Abstract In this article, highly experienced advertising academics and advertising research consultants John R. Rossiter and Larry Percy present and discuss what they believe to be the seven most important methodological guidelines that need to be implemented to improve the practice of advertising research. Their focus is on methodology, defined as first choosing a suitable theoretical framework to guide the research study and then identifying the advertising responses that need to be studied. Measurement of those responses is covered elsewhere in this special issue in the article by Bergkvist and Langner. Most of the frameworks are derived from the authors' own published work, although other frameworks are noted where appropriate. Disciplines Business Publication Details Rossiter, J. R. & Percy, L. (2017). Methodological Guidelines for Advertising Research. Journal of Advertising, 46 (1), 71-82. This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/buspapers/1103 3 supposed to somehow put together. In direct contrast with others’ efforts, the advertising planning frameworks in what has become known as “the Rossiter-Percy model” are the only comprehensive, systematic, and conceptually consistent frameworks available in the advertising textbook and journal article literature. Following, in the authors’ opinions, are the seven most important ones. 1. Buyer Response Steps and Repetition The first important concept to be understood in conjunction with the planning of advertising research is that advertising, to be successful, must pass through four basic buyer response steps – exposure, ad processing, brand communication effects, and brand purchase behavior or other purchase-related actions (to keep things simple, the following discussion refers to all behaviors targeted by advertising as “brand purchase”). As McGuire (1969) explains in connection with persuasion, these steps should be regarded as a chain of multiplicative probabilities, thus p(exposure) × p(ad processing) × p(brand communication effects) = p(brand purchase). The chances of advertising resulting in brand purchase are radically reduced by a low probability at any or all of the first three buyer response steps. Even the last step, brand purchase, is probabilistic since, because of possible derailment at the point of purchase, purchase cannot be guaranteed even after an ad has been effective on all prior steps. Consider, for example, the second step, ad processing. Ads that appear on informational websites, like Google or the various news sites, have a very low probability of being processed by those who visit the page because visitors with an information-seeking mindset have learned to ignore them. Let’s say that a banner ad is placed in an online newspaper visited by 10% of the population, that it is noticed and read by 5% of visitors, and that a typical 1% of these visitors are successfully communicated to by the banner ad and click through to the advertiser’s website. The probability chain is then .10 × .05 × .01 = 4 .00005, or five ten-thousandths of a percent of the population that clicks through to the website and thus has any chance of buying the product as a result. This compares with, say, a 1-page magazine ad where the probability of the ad being processed is more like p = .49, meaning that a completely persuasive ad that reaches 10% of the population would result in a possible 5% of the population, that is, .10 × .49 × 1.00 = .05, trying the product (a scenario that could well have been attained in the pre-TV days with the big magazines Life, Look, and perhaps The Saturday Evening Post). Even a prime-time TV commercial on a relatively high-rating series program would be lucky these days to reach 10% of households (in January this year, according to Nielsen ratings reported in Advertising Age, CBS’s NCIS was the highest rating series program, an average episode reaching 10.7% of households, followed by CBS’s The Big Bang Theory at 9.7%). A new 60-second TV commercial will likely be paid full attention to at least once by 80% of those households, but only 2% may be “in the market” and have the category need for the product. The estimated sales result: .10 × .80 × .02 = .016, or 1.6% of householders can possibly buy the brand as a result of the advertising – and that’s only if they are in the purchase situation soon after and don’t get derailed at the point of purchase by seeing a better or lower-priced brand. Rossiter and Percy, you will find, are the only textbook writers to draw attention to this advertising response probability chain, and it is a sobering reminder of just how hard it is to get advertising to work. The takeaway message for advertising researchers from this advertising response probability chain is that you cannot study just one of the steps – and usually the ad processing step is the one selected – and on that basis make an inference about the ad’s effectiveness. Also neglected in most advertising textbooks, beside the probabilistic chain of advertising response, is the role of repetition within the buyer response steps. Rossiter and Percy identify four different advertising situations as follows: (a) Direct-response ad or one- time promotion offer – where repetition is not necessary and the buyer response steps are 5 gone through only once, that is: exposure  ad processing  brand communication effects  brand purchase. (b) Ad repetition prior to action – this is the scenario needed for new product advertising. The potential buyer has to cycle through the first three buyer response steps at least several times before action can take place, thus: repetition (exposure, ad processing, brand communication effects)  brand purchase. This ad repetition sequence has major implications for advertising research, particularly for the pretesting of TV commercials. Although this never happens in academics’ or practitioners’ pretesting methods, informational new product commercials have to be exposed at least twice in a solus setting and about four times in a clutter setting, and transformational new product commercials at least three times and about six times in a clutter setting, before they can be properly evaluated for their ad processing probability and their brand communication effects probability. For those readers unfamiliar with the careful and specific Rossiter-Percy definitions: informational advertising addresses advertising situations where the primary motive for brand purchase is negatively originated, originating from a consumer-perceived problem or anticipated problem, so that the advertising promises negative reinforcement – called “negative” because it negates a problem – by buying this brand as the best solution to the problem; whereas transformational advertising addresses advertising situations where the primary motive for brand purchase is positively oriented, so that the advertising promises more positive reinforcement – sensory, intellectual, or social – from buying and using this brand than is promised by other brands. (c) Full sequence recycling after trial for repeat- purchase products and services – this is the type of repetition needed for established consumer packaged goods and regularly accessed services. Continued advertising is needed to keep the buyer buying the brand in the face of advertising for competing brands; thus, repetition of all four buyer response steps – full sequence recycling – occurs (exposure, ad processing, brand communication effects, brand purchase). In the established-brand scenario, 8 the rather mindless rote learning of the brand’s key benefit – is critical for an ad aimed at low-involvement brand choice, whereas the more carefully considered Acceptance responses – spontaneous cognitive responses made during ad processing – are critical for an ad aimed at high-involvement brand choice because they could just as easily be rejection responses, pushing the probability of successful ad processing down to zero. Also, Emotional responses, both positive and negative, have to be measured very specifically – not as overall affect or liking-disliking – and they have to be analyzed as an emotion shift (a negative emotion shifting to a slight positive emotion for informational advertising, and a neutral state or slight negative emotion shifting to a strongly positive emotion for transformational advertising). The lesson here is that advertising researchers cannot be said to have studied ad processing properly unless they measure all four processing responses, analyze them at the individual respondent level rather than aggregating them across respondents as is typically done, and analyze emotional responses as requiring a specified shift. The results of ad processing feed into the next sequence, that of brand communication effects. These communication effects, and there are five of them, are called Category Need, Brand Awareness, Brand Attitude, Brand Purchase Intention, and Purchase Facilitation. (Rossiter and Percy’s textbook is the only book that has identified all five communication effects, specified their accompanying options as communication objectives, and offered single-item measures of them.) Brand communication effects are learned in parallel, not in sequence, although they operate pretty much in sequence (as a hierarchy) during the brand choice process. Advertising for a familiar brand, which would usually represent a low- involvement brand choice, needs only to reinforce two communication effects: Brand Awareness, and Brand Attitude conditional on – that is, elicited from – prior Brand Awareness. Advertising for an unfamiliar brand in a category that is anything other than totally riskless, signalling a high-involvement brand choice, has to address all five 9 communication effects: it has to create or remind the prospective buyer of the Category Need, instil Brand Awareness connected to the Category Need, develop a favorable Brand Attitude conditional on the prior Brand Awareness, and encourage Brand Purchase Intention conditional on the presence of Category Need, and usually has to provide Purchase Facilitation with perhaps a promotion offer and a convenient means of obtaining the product. The problems in both academic and applied ad testing for brand communication effects are that no thought is given to which of the brand communication effects need to be measured and that in testing ads for high-involvement brand choice, such as direct-response ads (with digital media’s direct-response ads joining traditional media’s direct-response ads to form what is now the largest category of advertising), the first and last of the communication effects, Category Need and Purchase Facilitation, are neglected. The third and final sequence of effects to be taken into account, and in fact it has to be considered first when planning advertising research, is the buyer stage sequence. This sequence operates for individuals most often in hierarchical order. Brand-related communication effects feed into the buyer behavior hierarchy, which consists of five stages: Not in the Market, Need Arousal, Search and Evaluation, Purchase, and Usage. One of the most common problems, virtually universal in academic advertising research, is the testing of ads without knowing what particular stage the test respondents are in. As an example of this mistake, researchers in an advertising research article published not too long ago in JCR tested ads for unfamiliar imported beers with a U.S. undergraduate college student sample that consisted primarily of underage females, most of them, of course, Not in the Market, and, not surprisingly, the bipolar brand attitude ratings that the researchers measured clustered around the neutral midpoint. Another example is advertising intended to reach brand buyers not prior to purchase but actually while they are in the Usage stage; this post-purchase advertising can reduce possible dissonance and reinforce choice of the brand for next time. 10 Proprietary ad testing services are somewhat better in this regard in that they are likely to screen at least for category usage versus non-usage, although the other stage distinctions are usually missed. 3. The Probability of Attention to the Ad The most neglected aspect of ad processing in both commercial and academic advertising research, ad testing research especially, is the probability of the prospective buyer paying initial attention to ads in the different media of advertising and to the different advertising units within that medium. Initial attention determines the entire likelihood (probability) of the ad processing step being successfully completed. Attention probabilities, of course, also vitally affect the actual delivery of media plans (via the exposure step of the buyer response sequence). The Rossiter co-authored textbooks (1987, 1997, 1998, and 2005) are the sole compiled source of all-media estimated ad attention probabilities. Academic advertising researchers have always overlooked ad unit attention factors and now the neglect has spread to practitioners, too. In the good old days, most large broadcast advertisers subscribed to Burke’s Day-After Recall service which estimated attention to TV commercials and radio commercials of different formats and lengths by measuring the proportion of the program audience who could recall seeing or hearing the commercial within a day or two after it being aired. Similarly, most large print advertisers who spent substantial budgets in magazines and newspapers subscribed to the Starch Noted service which estimated attention to print ads of different formats and sizes by the through- the-book recognition method. For some reason, use of these two services has dwindled to a trickle but, fortunately for these traditional media, attention norms have not changed (simply because human psychophysiology has not changed). Traditional media advertisers, therefore, 13 group with the attitude rating registered by an unexposed control group. Little do they realize that this improved attitude could never come into play unless the ad has also achieved brand awareness. In fact, the new attitude will never be elicited unless the consumer or prospective buyer happens to encounter and recognize the brand when in a shopping situation or when searching on a retailer’s website, and it will never be retrieved from long-term memory unless the prospect is able to recall the brand when the category need arises. Brand awareness is therefore a gatekeeper. Brand Awareness is very tricky to measure properly, and is necessary to measure the appropriate type for the brand choice situation at hand. As Rossiter and Percy uniquely point out, there are two basic types of brand awareness, involving recognition and recall respectively, and a third compound type, increasing in importance in today’s giant retail displays, called brand recall-boosted recognition. The researcher can figure out the predominant type of brand awareness by conducting up-front research (or, it must be said, by doing a little sensible introspection and thinking) to construct what Rossiter and Percy call a behavioral sequence model. This can easily be done in focus-group research by asking the participants, individually, to mentally walk through the last purchase or purchase attempt in the product or service category, with the researcher carefully making a record of the main cue that initiated the brand choice. Table 2 shows the possibilities. Table 2 about here Brand Recognition is the appropriate form of brand awareness to measure when the brand is encountered, usually among other brands, at the point of purchase. (The Rossiter- Percy Grid, shown later, gives some typical examples of brand recognition situations.) Here, the initiating cue is the brand name or the brand package or brand logo itself – and it is important to determine which one of these specific cues is the cause of the recognition 14 response because that is the cue that should be emphasized in the brand’s advertising. To measure Brand Recognition in an advertising pretest, the researcher has to show the respondents a typical competitive brand display and asked them to point out as quickly as possible those brands that they recognize, allowing 10 seconds, a generous search time for any brand display in the real world, for this task. If this test is conducted in up-front research, the researcher can ask respondents how they recognized each brand, because that will further indicate the precise recognition stimulus or stimuli to include in the advertising. There is also the occasional situation of auditory recognition of the name when the brand name is spoken, as when ordering a beverage in a restaurant or when a friend or acquaintance in conversation is recommending alternatives. Brand Recall is the appropriate form of brand awareness to measure when brand choice is initiated prior to the point of purchase (again, see examples in the Rossiter-Percy Grid). The initiating cue here, of course, is the very first communication effect, Category Need. The brands are not available to be recognized, so they have to be recalled from long- term memory in response to the category cue. Notice that brand recall cannot, as some proprietary ad-testing company researchers seem to believe, be tested by seeing whether test respondents can recall the brand name from the ad; it matters only that they can recall it from the category cue. Most often, what has to be recalled is the brand name so that the prospective buyer can go online or look up a directory to find out where the brand can be bought. Likely the biggest mistake made in all forms of advertising is to emphasize or repeat the brand name only, without connecting it to the product or service category. In an ad test, category-cued brand name recall can and should be tested before administering the brand attitude measure. A pre-post design is ideal here but a fair approximation can be made from an experimental-control design by comparing the two groups’ recall of the target brand at the 15 individual level and then recording as successful brand recall the proportion of respondents who recall the target brand in the, say, the top three when given the category cue. Brand Recall-Boosted Recognition, which occurs when the prospect has to recall the brand first and then go looking for it in a competitive display, is an increasingly prevalent brand awareness situation. Not only are supermarket and drug retailers becoming larger in their category displays but so also are department stores and clothing stores, with a flood of name brands and retailer brands for consumers to choose from. In this brand awareness situation, advertising has a much more complex task: it has to stimulate brand recall by connecting the brand tightly to the category and also has to emphasize the appropriate brand recognition cue. In measuring this compound type of brand awareness, the recognition test obviously has to come first, followed by the recall test. The researcher then has to analyze the results in reverse order and then score recognition conditional on recall. Brand-awareness measurement is nuanced and difficult, so it is not too surprising that academic researchers take the easy way out by not measuring it at all, and that proprietary ad testing and tracking services take the wrong way out by measuring brand awareness incorrectly. The Rossiter-Percy approach is the only approach that draws attention to this major advertising research problem and offers a theoretically sound solution. 5. Misuse of the Rossiter-Percy Grid The Rossiter-Percy advertising planning grid is probably the present authors’ best- known contribution to the advertising research literature. However, it is almost always misunderstood and misused. A new version of the grid that hopefully will clear up these misunderstandings and prevent the grid’s misuse is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2 about here 18 6. Brand Attitude: Informational or Transformational The Rossiter-Percy textbook, not so much in the first edition but certainly beginning with the second edition, makes extremely important contributions to the theory of Brand Attitude. There are actually three main contributions: a brand attitude model, an explanation of how informational advertising works, and an explanation of how transformational advertising works. (a) Rossiter and Percy provided a model, a “free standing” emotion-added extension of the pioneering Fishbein model, showing how brand attitude can be created, increased, or changed downwards in some cases, in two different and not necessarily incompatible ways: by instilling the learning of brand benefit beliefs (via so-called informational advertising) or by associatively pairing the brand with specific favorable emotions or even with an overall feeling of positive affect (via so-called transformational advertising). This is a logical, quantifiable model. We know from our industry contacts that many managers use it, but we have seen not one academic use it in an advertising research study. (b) Informational advertising instils brand benefit beliefs by making benefit claims, not by trying to communicate the benefit literally. Indeed, brands competing in the same product or service category often address the same key benefit, but advertising agencies are differentially effective in creating belief in this benefit for the brand simply because they make a more persuasive benefit claim. Advertising researchers, commercial or academic, invariably fail to understand the difference between a benefit, objectively stated and general, and the all-important benefit claim, subjectively stated or visually portrayed, and specific. To the present authors’ knowledge, the sole exception has been the professional advertising researcher Howard Moskowitz, who for many years has been testing the persuasiveness of specific visual, verbal, and musically conveyed benefit claims. 19 Informational ads have to work immediately if they are to work at all (think direct- response ads, for example). This means that informational print ads should be tested with a single exposure to the test audience whereas informational broadcast ads should be allowed two exposures because it is usually too difficult to pick up the benefit claims from a single exposure. The brand’s benefit claims do not have to be remembered, although “catchy” short and concretely worded benefit claims often are remembered. What is essential, however, is not whether the consumer recalls the benefit claim but rather that the claim has resulted in an increase in or, if already very positive, reinforcement of the consumer’s attitude toward the brand. (c) Transformational advertising – the type of advertising that gives advertising its popularity – slowly builds brand attitude by the deliberate, or more often accidental, use of evaluative conditioning. Evaluative conditioning, unlike classical conditioning, is very resistant to extinction, which means that a transformational brand attitude, once it has been established, can survive long hiatus periods. For advertising researchers, the slow buildup of evaluative conditioning means that transformational ads cannot be validly tested after a single exposure, and in fact it is difficult to test them at all unless the researcher employs a single-item bipolar rating measure of Ab introduced immediately after seeing or hearing the ad. At least three solus exposures are needed to properly test a transformational ad, which is equivalent to about six exposures under normal media conditions. Transformational advertising is the only type of advertising that lends support to the oft-heard claim arguments made by advertising agency creatives that “advertising can’t be measured,” meaning in Rossiter-Percy terms that the brand attitude can’t be measured with a detailed questionnaire, or that “it takes time to build,” meaning in Rossiter-Percy terms that the ad needs time to achieve enough exposures at the individual level for evaluative conditioning to take place. That said, there is a lot of ill-designed transformational 20 advertising out there, due to advertising researchers failing to pretest independently the evaluative intensity of the visual, auditory, and verbal cues that are supposed to achieve the transformation. 7. The Future of Ad Testing Our colleagues Lars Bergkvist and Tobias Langner review ad testing measures in a separate article in this issue, so here the present authors take the opportunity to comment on where we think ad testing, that is, pretesting, is going as a methodology and where it should be going. Specifically, we foresee a big rise in the method of Management Judgment Ad Testing, a method first explained in the Rossiter-Percy textbooks. Online ad testing, we predict, will cause this rise. The rapid rise of the Internet and with it the category of so-called digital advertising – now ranking in the top three budget-spending categories in most countries – has been accompanied by a return to the old-fashioned method of split-run ad testing, known in its digital reincarnation as A/B ad testing. Split-run ad testing originated for testing print ads, then, with the advent of cable TV it was extended to the testing of TV commercials. With the Internet, the split-run method can now be used to test digital print ads and online-delivered TV commercials as well (radio commercials since the early days, and print ads in traditional media nowadays, are hardly ever pretested, and neither are outdoor ads). Increasingly, pretests of online ads are being conducted cheaply through services such as Survey Monkey, which charge per question, so that the focus is on end-result questions such as purchase intentions or, in the case of direct-response ads purchase enquiries or actual purchase orders. There is little room for diagnostic questions, if they are included at all, that can reveal why the ad did or did not work. 23 the last sequence, buyer stages, means that you will not be able to identify the appropriate target audience for the advertising. 3. Most advertising research studies focus on the ad processing step and the brand communication effects step and sometimes both. In studying ad processing, researchers must measure all four processing responses – attention, learning, emotions, and acceptance – and must analyze these responses at the individual level, not as responses aggregated over the total sample as is common analysis practice. More sophisticated is the understanding that advertising to a low-involvement target audience requires learning responses whereas advertising to a high-involvement target audience requires acceptance responses during ad processing. Most importantly advertising researchers must account for initial attention paid to ads in different media and of differing size (print ads) and duration (broadcast ads) because initial attention probabilities are the largest single factor affecting ad processing. 4. In studying brand communication effects, researchers must explain why they are including or excluding the following five communication effects – category need, brand awareness, brand attitude, brand purchase intention, and purchase facilitation. They must note that brand awareness and brand attitude must always be measured and that brand attitude cannot come into play until the prospective buyer has achieved brand awareness, which in turn means brand awareness of the appropriate type – either brand recognition, category-cued brand recall, or brand recall-boosted recognition. 5. Also essential for planning advertising research is the Rossiter-Percy Grid. This 6- cell grid requires the manager (and the researcher) to specify the type of brand awareness and the type of brand attitude to be achieved, with the latter depending on the low vs. high degree of risk perceived by the particular target audience in buying this brand on the next purchase occasion. Most critically, the creative tactics studied by advertising researchers are not 24 general, as most advertisers and researchers believe, and the study of creative tactics makes no sense unless they are studied in the correctly classified cells of the Rossiter-Percy Grid. 6. Advertising researchers must understand the distinction between benefits, objectively stated, and subjective advertised claims about those benefits, and only the latter are of any importance. Only one researcher that we know of correctly studies benefit claims – visual, verbal, and musical – and other researchers, if they wish to produce realistic findings about advertising effectiveness, need to follow this lead. 7. Our final recommendation is that advertising researchers adopt the management judgment ad test method. This method, besides being cost-effective and encouraging management buy-in, forces the advertising researcher to consider and specify the ad processing and brand communication objectives in the sort of detail that we have outlined in this article. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank the Editor, Shintaro Okazaki, and their colleague, Lars Bergkvist, for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 25 Recommended References McGuire, William J. (1969), “The Nature of Attitudes and Attitude Change,” in G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (Eds), The Handbook of Social Psychology, Second Edition, Volume 3, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley (pp. 136-314). Percy, Larry, and Richard Rosenbaum-Elliott (2016), Strategic Advertising Management, Fifth Edition, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rossiter, John R., and Steven Bellman (2005), Marketing Communications: Theory and Applications, Sydney, Australia: Pearson. Rossiter, John R., and Peter J. Danaher (1998), Advanced Media Planning, Boston: Kluwer. Rossiter, John R., and Larry Percy (1987), Advertising and Promotion Management, New York: McGraw-Hill. Rossiter, John R., and Larry Percy (1997), Advertising Communications & Promotion Management, Second Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill. Rossiter, John R., and Larry Percy (in preparation), Advertising and Promotion Management, Third Edition, London: Sage. Rossiter, John R., Larry Percy, and Robert J. Donovan (1991), “A Better Advertising Planning Grid,” Journal of Advertising Research, 30 (5), 11-21. 28 TABLE 1 Attention Probability Estimates for Various Ad Units TV commercials Radio commercials 90-sec. or longer 60-sec. 30-sec. (standard) Co-viewed Solus 15-sec. 10-sec. 1.00 .76 .65 .60 .70 .54 .45 60-sec. 30-sec. 15-sec. 10-sec. .42 .30 .24 .21 Newspaper Ads B&W 2C 4C 2-page ad .52 .68 .77 1-page .43 .56 .64 ½-page .30 .39 .45 ¼-page .21 .27 .31 Magazine Ads Consumer B2B Multipage, 4C insert .78 n.a. 2-page, 4C spread .64 1.00 1-page, 4C .50 .64 1-page, 2C .39 .55 1-page, B&W .34 .46 ½-page, B&W .24 .32 Outdoor Ads Pedestrians Drivers Overhead or line of driving n.a. .92 Stand-alone outdoor .80 .53 Stand-alone indoor .90 n.a With adjacent ads .40 .38 Bus side, taxi back .30 .50 Bus shelter .40 .25 29 Yellow Pages (incl. e-Yellow) 1-page display 1.00 ½-page display ad .82 In-column, ¼-column or ¼-page display .72 In-column, less than ¼-page .55 In-column listing (normal or bold) .16 Online (Web) Ads Permission email (opening) .68 Spam email (opening) .34 Banner ad – static .30 Banner ad – popup or animated .40 Website (from click-through) Home page 1.00 Page 2 .24 Page 3 .21 Page 4 .15 30 TABLE 2 Brand Awareness Types and Cue-Response Sequences Brand awareness type Initiating cue Awareness response Brand Recognition Brand name, pack, or brand logo Recognize brand then ask self “Do I have the category need?” Brand Recall Category need Recall brand name Brand Recall- Boosted Recognition 1. Category need 1. Recall brand name 2. Search for brand 2. Recognize brand