Abstract:

The paper starts with examining the needs of marketing and advertising practitioners in the region from advertising pre-testing. This is done through in-depth interviews conducted by the author with a few leading professionals in the advertising business. A key theme emerging from these interviews was that pre-testing needs to do more than just sift good ads from bad. Pre-testing needs to be diagnostic in nature. The paper then goes on to present a pre-testing methodology that is predictive as well as diagnostic. Findings from a case study are presented to demonstrate how advertising pre-testing can go beyond being merely a report card of the performance of an ad and can become a diagnostic tool providing directions for how the ad can be made more effective.