Abstract:

Year after year industry invests ever increasing amounts in advertising, in order to keep up with the great competitive struggle. The sums thus spent go into hundreds of millions. Advertising should and must create advantages in competition. That's what it is being conceived for. The advertiser expects advertising to produce concrete effects and tangible successes. And how do advertising effectiveness and success translate themselves to him ? Well, mainly and immediately in terms of increased sales and profits. But when it comes to optimising the advertising budget, mere thinking in terms of overall objectives can no longer be of great help. What's needed here is systematic analysing of what advertising can be expected to achieve, and how and to what extent its performance can directly or indirectly contribute to increase profits. And this is where advertising research comes in. A most serious handicap to advertising research is the fact that so far it is not altogether capable of scrutinising the basic possibilities of advertising effects either sufficiently broadly or profoundly enough or even systematically. Let's start out, in the first place, by going over the seven mortal sins in advertising research, one after the other.