Fundamental Ideas I

1
Fundamental Ideas (I)

• Must assess cost of information, relative to
  reward value of that information, itself weighted
  by the certainty of achieving those rewards
• Perfect data can cost a perfectly outrageous
  amount of money!
• Relatively invalid data cant deliver much in the
  way of reward
• Situations low in risk cant justify much
  expenditure on advertising research.

2
Advertising Research

• COPY TESTING
• Ad executions
• Diagnostic and predictive
• Many validity issues
• Low cost
• Very important, some of the time

• CAMPAIGN EVALUATION
• Multi-month effort
• Summary and descriptive
• Few validity issues
• High cost
• Generally important, much of the time

3
Tracking Study--Measures

• Driven by hierarchy of effects
• Awareness
• What brands of X can you name?
• Knowledge
• T/F, or agree/disagree, or attribute prompt
• Brand Liking
• Adjectives, superiority, perceptions
• Preference
• Rank order, one best
• Usage

4
Copy Tests

• Key questions
• Exploratory or confirmatory in intent?
• What consumer response is the focus?
• Some possibilities
• Interviews of various kinds (very diagnostic)
• Theater tests (more confirmatory--preference--some
  diagnostics)
• In-home (typically recall)
• Coupon (near facsimile of sales)
• Physiological (beware this Shangri La of
  advertising testing!)

5
Fundamental Ideas Relevant to Advertising
Research (II)

• Internal vs. External Validity
• Internal how confident are we that X--the
  advertising--caused O--the measured outcome?
• Was it really the co-presence of Y that produced
  O?
• Did Z produce both X and O?
• The key idea is control--minimizing alternative
  explanations/plausible rival hypotheses
• External how likely would we be to obtain the
  same results, in the real context of interest, as
  in the controlled circumstances of the test?
• The key idea is proximal similarity--reproducing
  in the test the key aspects of the context