blood pressure, pupil dilation, perspiration—to an ad. These tests measure attention-
getting power but reveal nothing about impact on beliefs, attitudes, or intentions.
Table 5.8 describes some specific advertising research techniques.
Haley, Stafforoni, and Fox argue that current copy-testing methods have become
so familiar and well-established that it is easy to overlook their sizable limitations.
These methods tend to be excessively rational and verbal, and to rely primarily on
respondents’ playback in one form or another. They argue that marketers need to
take more account of ads’ nonverbal elements, which can be very strong influences
on behavior.^35
Advertisers are also interested in posttesting the overall communication impact of
a completed campaign. If a company hoped to increase brand awareness from 20 per-
cent to 50 percent and succeeded in increasing it to only 30 percent, then the com-
pany is not spending enough, its ads are poor, or some other factor has been ignored.
Sales-Effect Research
What sales are generated by an ad that increases brand awareness by 20 percent and
brand preference by 10 percent? Advertising’s sales effect is generally harder to mea-
sure than its communication effect. Sales are influenced by many factors, such as the
product’s features, price, and availability, as well as competitors’ actions. The fewer or
more controllable these other factors are, the easier it is to measure effect on sales.
The sales impact is easiest to measure in direct-marketing situations and hardest to
measure in brand or corporate-image-building advertising.
Companies are generally interested in finding out whether they are overspending
or underspending on advertising. One approach to answering this question is to work
with the formulation shown in Figure 5-14.
A company’s share of advertising expenditures produces a share of voice that earns
a share of consumers’ minds and hearts and ultimately a share of market. Peckham
studied the relationship between share of voice and share of market for several con-
sumer products over a number of years and found a 1-to-1 ratio for established^595
Advertising Research TechniquesTABLE 5.8
For Print Ads.