LWT's interest has been to encourage greater use of television advertising by financial institutions. To provide a link between ourselves and potential advertisers, we launched a Financial Marketing Review in December 1985 to bring to wider attention the potential of television advertising for promoting awareness and understanding of financial products and services that have traditionally been the preserve of the press. As an input to the Review, we commissioned NOP Market Research Ltd to conduct a series of surveys. The first concentrated on Stocks and Shares and related issues such as privatisations and takeovers, and the second concentrated on unit trusts and personal equity plans. A third study is now in the offing to assess the impact of Black Monday when the bottom fell out of the equity market last October. Many new investors saw their holdings plummet in value even faster than they had soared in previous months. For most, the loss of assets was on paper and did not materially affect their income or lifestyle, but the psychological impact may well have been far reaching.
The papers themselves will be of interest and value to delegates. The scene will be set by a careful positioning of research within strategic marketing planning - a paper from an experienced international researcher corporate planner in an American multinational. This will be followed by a paper on the profitability which can result from research in marketing - using research to develop and launch a successful new brand Into a European market. There are three papers on profitability from research within the company and again, we have two speakers here from the user side. Profitability from research for researchers is covered with a thoughtful paper on the value of thinking by a researcher from New York. Research to improve the profitability of government and social policies will be covered in a joint ESOMAR/WAPOR session, which will include papers from Germany, France and the United States. Profitability from research in advertising will be covered both from the technique side with a paper from Holland and by looking at a major corporate advertising research project for a multinational British-based oil company - again a paper which involves two people from the user side of research. The penultimate paper looks at our investment in research and casts an eye on what we should be doing - this is a paper from an agency researcher, a statistician - but a statistician who thinks about the implications of the way research is, and should be, approached.
The advertising was felt to be trying to make the public 'aware' of what it was doing as an organization and further endeavoring to attract new passengers on the basis of efficiency, value for money, fast trains, etc. Respondents were unlikely to see the advertising as directed explicitly at 'them' unless they identified or had experienced any of the aspects of the advertising, for example, respondents in the South were more likely to respond to those advertisements concerned with current rail travel.
One of the hottest issues for advertisers and advertising agencies , in the USA as well as Europe, is now Corporate Advertising. This specific branch of advertising, which deals, not with selling products, but in building a Corporate Identity and a Corporate Image for a company, has known a tremendous development in the last few years. In the US, the 49 biggest advertisers have been using Corporate advertising more and more, since 1968 and today, medium-sized advertisers have joined them. The media are bulging with corporate ads: two-thirds of the total advertisement in Business Week Magazine, 35% of the total ad revenue for Time Magazine. In Europe, the trend is still limited, but seems to be growing at a fast pace.