Abstract:

In the rapidly evolving marketing environment in the Middle East, the communication process is becoming increasingly important and hence so is the need to evaluate the efficiency of an organisation's communication activities. The BUY TEST is an advertising pre-testing technique which is widely used in developing countries for evaluating advertising effectiveness and has been used in the Middle East region for the past 3 years. The paper first briefly describes the BUY TEST approach to advertising pre-testing and examines some of the issues relating to its implementation in Arab countries. It illustrates some of the practical problems faced and the measures which have been adopted to ensure successful and valid data collection, and assesses how the distribution of responses among Arab consumers differs from those in Western countries.