This paper will describe a project recently undertaken in the United States to attempt to validate some commonly used copy testing measures. New Product commercials were chosen for study for two reasons: 1. in their own right, they represent a special class of commercials of interest to many marketers; and 2. they are considerably easier to validate than ads for established brands, for a number of reasons described in the paper. The key in-market validation measure used was the level of consumer trial generated by the commercial (after correcting for differences between brands based on ad spending, promotion and price). The paper describes the validation procedure in detail, including its limitations, and then shows the results for two major copy-testing procedures: day-after-recall (e.g., Burke tests), and the Viewer Response Profile (as developed by Schlinger).
This paper will use material from three studies to demonstrate that, even at low levels of participation, postal surveys can be used for rapid and reliable feedback.
The Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) can be used to explain and forecast changes in the aggregate course of the economy. Its explanatory as well as its predictive power appears to be relatively low. Partly this might be caused by some methodological problems inhearent to the way in which the questions (upon which the ICS is based) are asked and in which the ICS is computed. Some of these issues already occurred in the literature to a certain extent. In this paper some new evidence is presented to underline the methodological weakness of the index. This is done by means of time series analysis of the Dutch ICS in the period 1974-1983, as well as by means of analysis of one cross section referring to a questionnaire we did ourselves in the spring of 1984. There appear to be for instance serious problems with respect to the interdependences between the answers on the questions and over time, the unidimensionality of the scales, the homogeneity of the answers given. Moreover the ICS differs among various subgroups of the population and especially among different subgroups facing different developments in for instance income.
In this paper, a classification method (the index method) is proposed which aims to discriminate between members of two groups (e.g. buyers and non-buyers). The index method is compared with two-group discriminant analysis which is a standard and common technique of exploratory data analysis for selecting relevant variables and specifying the relationships between variables. It is shown how the index methods accounts for the problems met in applying two-group discriminant analysis.
In recent years, the Delphi technique has become one of the most widely used qualitative forecasting approaches. However, relatively little has been written about the validity of the situational factors which are likely to influence the outcome of a Delphi forecast. This paper reviews the literature on this topic briefly and reports on the findings of a Delphi study on the future of tourism to Scotland. Its focus is not on the forecast which was generated by the Delphi study, but on the factors influencing the forecast itself.
Effect hierarchy models have a long and well-establis tradition in marketing and communication research. Figure 1.1. contains an overview of some of the more prominent ones, viz. the "AIDA" model due to Strong (1925), the "Hierarchy of Effects" model of Lavidge and Steiner and Rogers' (1962) "Innovation Adoption" model. Also eluded in the figure is the hierarchy underlying the TEST, an integrated conceptual and measurement model copy testing that has been developed and validated by Sherman Group Inc. It is a commercial application of BUY©TEST, conducted by AIM Research, Denmark, that will form the empirical basis for this paper.
This paper addresses some of the issues pertinent to the mapping process with the aim of simplifying the choice of alternatives. A number of commonly used and recently developed mapping methods are systematically compared by partitioning the mapping process into its individual components to examine which (if any) have the largest effect and which have relatively no effect on the map obtained. Results of the comparative analysis, in conjunction with evidence from related research, are then used to suggest some practical guidelines to assist in the selection of appropriate mapping techniques.
Because perception is important in the field of advertising, some perceptual phenomena and theoretical insights are discussed, since several misconceptions, mysticisms and controversies seem to exist with regard to 'subliminal perception' and the role of affect in particular and tachistoscopic experimentation in general. A general principle of information processing is introduced, namely the TOTE-concept, which offers an explanation for the effects of tachistoscopic conditions on the perception process and the main results of recent tachistoscopic experiments. These experiments are convergent in pointing out that people can process stimulus-information at the semantic level of meaning, while they are unable to identify the stimulus (of which presence they are actually not even aware because of pattern-masking). It is argued that research in the field of marketing and advertising could take advantage of this situation by the employment of tachistoscopic pattern-masking techniques.
In this paper, the authors describe a method which has been tested over many years. It offers a means for testing the sales effect of price decisions before the new price has been released on the market. Thus marketing companies can evaluate pricing decisions without revealing their intent to the competition. To date most 'laboratory' test methods rely on respondents who are solely shown the brand as a concept, this paper stresses the importance of collecting product-in-use data related to different price levels. Often it is the in-use evaluation of the brand which yields the most reliable estimate of price elasticity.
This paper describes the use of awareness tracking data to monitor differences in commercial quality and increases in brand awareness in time. It describes the relationships between awareness variations due to advertising spending and the quality of commercials with in-market results. Case studies show how awareness growth can affect brand penetration so that faster awareness generation can produce faster penetration. This would lead to greater sales volume over a given time period.
This paper gives the background, research techniques used and a broad outline of the results of research undertaken by Renault UK Ltd into the passenger car market. The paper goes through all the stages of research and covers Stage III in particular detail as this was where computers were used in three different ways. This is, we believe, relatively unusual in the UK. Computers were used to interview respondents, to analyse data and produce attribute maps and to analyse qualitative questions by keywords.
This new material can be analysed in the same way as verbal material. We start with a content-analysis and a symbolic, metaphorical and psycho-analytical interpretation of the signs sent out, just as we would with words. The only difference is that these unlock the door to the imaginary world of respondents and to their unconscious - something that words are less able to do nowadays; and this new material also supplies information on marginal and differentiating factors relating to the phenomena under study.