Marketers who wish to continually improve advertising productivity will begin to apply a Total Quality approach to the advertising development and management processes, using statistically sound (sales-related) measurement feedback at appropriate stages in the process. The empirical evidence observed to date suggests that the persuasion measurement (as collected by RSC) is an appropriate criterion measure for this statistical feedback and truly contributes to continuous business improvement, particularly when applied at the following stages of the advertising process: before creative execution, to find a persuasive selling proposition; before production, to determine the number of executions needed for the media plan (given wear out projections); before airing, to determine which ads are the most persuasive executions of the selling proposition; and while airing, to implement execution refreshment and rotation, maximizing persuasive power (PRPs) delivered to market. On the other hand, the empirical evidence also suggests that marketers who continue to rely on hit and miss processes and measurement feedback (such as liking, recall, weight alone, brand name recall, etc.) will be out-marketed and perhaps out of business in the highly competitive global arena of the 21st Century.
In North America and WestemEurope, the slowing of population expansion and inflation as well as ever increasing global competition have made it extremely difficult for marketers to achieve consistent revenue and profit growth. At the same time, much of the profit gains from efficiencies in manufacturing, distribution, and consohdation have been realized. The challenge set for the 1990 s and beyond is to manage profitable growth through continual improvement in marketing productivity. Recent studies of scanner panel data by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) have shown the profit limitations of couponing and trade dealing, such that heavy investments in these price-related allocations appear to have a low likelihood of contributing significantly to profitable growth in the future (Fulgoni, 1990). On the other hand, while advertisings track record in these same studies is only slightly better, there is new and exciting evidence which suggests that advertising can be the main driver of consistent growth in revenues and profits, when the principles of Total Quality Management are applied to the advertising development and management process.