"While Stock Lasts!" or
However, hard selling lacks many widely reported Road-to-Damascus conversions: it seldom "sells" from scratch. But it can act as a reminder--a rather intrusive way of drawing renewed attention to the brand.
"BUY X NOW!"
Hard sell in advertising might help the already persuaded to "close the sale" themselves. Formal tests of representative examples of over 100 TV, print, and outdoor advertisements, using some 500 consumers, advertising professionals, and marketing students as subjects, confirmed that more than half the advertisements were NOT seen as differentiating the brand from its competitors.
How Publicity Functions Through Memory
Because of the elapsed time between exposure and behavior, advertising has to work through people's memory. It requires long-term memory (LTM).
Recent developments in physiological memory research suggest that synapses need to be consolidated (nerve cells linking) for information to be processed into LTM (Franzen and Bouwman, 2001). More immediately actionable is the psychology of the memory process. To enable this for a brand, repetitive advertising can provide more or less controlled exposures to the brand (what is said, when, where, how often, and with what creative treatments).
Indeed, just repeating a brand name-- "mere exposure" (Zajonc, 1968, and Harrison, 1968)--is known to breed Familiarity, "the absolutely basic value created by advertising," as James Webb Young already stressed early in the last century. Consumers can also have exposures to the brand other than by paid-for advertising, though that is usually less easily controlled: the brand being mentioned by others, a glimpse of the pack in a store, an empty can lying in the gutter, and especially using the brand.
Even the sheer act of remembering can refresh memory traces for the brand (Hilts, 1991). (It works if it works--that is the creative challenge.) An advertisement that is liked may also be looked at more often or longer. Thus the brand may be better remembered (without "Liking the advertising" having to translate into "Liking the brand," Kennedy and Sharp, 2001).
Once a message or image is placed in our long-term memory, it seems virtually never to be forgotten (e.g., Hunter, 1964; Franzen and Bouwman, 2001). Some things are harder to recall than others. So a key issue is how the memory of a specific brand can be readily accessed, i.e., recalled in a purchase situation?
Recall And Memory Associations
Mostly we can recall things instantly, as when we talk or think-but not always, as in recalling a (well-known) name.
It has long been known that memory is created, stored, and accessed via associations, mostly subconsciously, e.g., "Holes [left and right arrow] Polo," "Refreshes [left and right arrow] Heineken," or the color red for The Economist, Coca-Cola, or Virgin (Franzen and Bouwman, 2001).
A re-exposure can also dramatically revive fading recall (e.g., Zielske, 1959; McDonald, 1997). It can make recall easier in varied situations. Memory-associations for a brand are often highly individualized (e.g., "My Aunt Ella used it," or "It's the one we bought at Safeway") rather than a brand having just one global "image" for all consumers.
Publicizing a brand is therefore about what consumers do with the advertising rather than what advertisements do to consumers: "What evokes the brand, not what the brand evokes" (Lannon, 1993).
Publicity Not Persuasion
As noted earlier, contemporary accounts of advertising say that it works by persuasion, or at least they imply it (e.g., in "persuasion testing").
But there is no evidence that advertising universally (or even generally) "converts" consumers.
1. Persuasion is simply treated as a self-evident neologism: "Advertising is meant to be persuasive. Therefore if it's an advertisement, it must be persuasive.
2. People are exposed to innumerable advertisements each day, and probably note many or most of them at least subconsciously (Heath, 2001)--but with almost no apparent effects: "See advertising and do nothing." By its own persuasion-goal, therefore, far more than the proverbial half of persuasive advertising would be wasted.
3. Advertisements seldom seem constructed to appear persuasive, let alone strongly so ("Heavy Sell"). They offer or imply no strong incentives, emotions, or rhetoric.
4. Much advertising theory seems to presume that in the absence of functional brand differentiation, the advertisements have to give every consumer some reason, benefit, or added value to be able to select one brand rather than another. But in practice, consumers need the product and seem to know that brands are near-look-a-likes: "I know these brands are all the same. (Bullmore, 1998)
5. Persuasive advertising (e.g., strong sell) should be heavily affected by wear-out (e.g., Pechmann and Stewart, 1989): people find being repeatedly exhorted boring or even irritating.
6. The short-term effects of advertising that occur can hardly be due to strong "persuasion" if they are only short-term. But they can be caused by momentarily refreshed brand awareness.
Basically our view is that advertisements can be effective [or "act"] simply through publicizing the brand memorably, without having to "persuade" consumers that the brand is better than they thought before. Such publicizing works through the brand's "Salience."
Salience
Why does an experienced consumer first buy a particular brand and then continue to buy it (often as part of a repertoire of two or more habitual brands)? The process may be described as the brand having gained and then maintained what we call Salience, in a rather broad sense of the term.
- What such Salience is
- How Salience seems to develop
- How Salience works
- How it requires the brand to be "distinctive" but not "differentiated" (e.g., functionally)
What is salience?
Salience in our sense is about the brand coming to mind in personally relevant choice situations (Romaniuk and Sharp, 2002b). The brand has become part of one's broad consideration set, a brand that one might buy or use--either now, or in years ahead.
Salience concerns the "size" of the brand in one's mind (Romaniuk and Sharp, 2002b), i.e., all the memory structures that can allow the brand to come forward for the wide range of recall cues that can occur in purchase occasions. That is our broad designation of "Salience"--awareness and memory traces, plus familiarity, plus assurance.
Moran (1990) in his seminal paper already stressed the role of a brand's "Presence." Salience is not exclusive. An individual usually has a consideration set of several competitive brands that he or she may choose to buy over a series of purchases (and others not). For a brand to be in a consumer's consideration set or to be actually chosen, the brand does not have to be seen as "best," but only as "good enough." Crucially, in our view, this conforms with consumers' primary need being not for a brand but for the product. In a competitive market they then have to choose one of the available options of that product or service, which would typically nowadays be named or even "branded."
Consumers therefore find themselves having to choose between brands in their consideration set that are mostly "near-look-a-likes" to them, i.e., items that are distinctively labeled but intrinsically similar or even virtually identical (except--strictly--in how they look).
How salience develops
There is as yet no clearly known path for a brand to follow so as to become salient and enter a consumer's consideration set (see Shocker et al., 1991; Roberts and Lattin, 1997, for reviews).
Views of how consumers can be made to choose or adopt a brand have at times been oversimplified. Economists from Galbraith (1958) downwards--and indeed many marketing people--seem to have long believed that marketing or advertising can simply manipulate or persuade the consumer. Pyramidal equity models have replaced hierarchical-effects models like AIDA. Econometricians have sought to determine "drivers" of consumer choice by marketing-mix decision-models. Hedges spelled out how a consumer, faced with a new brand P (or one "new" to that consumer), can dither on a slow path toward a decision (which ultimately was not even to try P!):
* First the consumer usually has to become aware of the new brand P, by name or looks, at least subconsciously (e.g., not really being aware of being aware of the brand, as in Heath, 2001).
* The consumer then perhaps becomes aware of an advertisement for P (hardly noticed explicitly before), suddenly notes that the brand is actually in the stores, probably notices another advertisement or two for the new P, tries to relate P to his or her present brand(s), and hears some word-of-mouth perhaps.
* P's advertising and retail display may also engender some assurance for P. Experienced consumers will hardly expect the new brand P to be very different. If it were, there would be more talk about that (including in the advertising). Nonetheless, the consumer may consider trying P when next buying the category: "I've heard of P.
* If brand P upon actual purchase or usage seems satisfactory (which often is the case with established brands), the brand may be bought again. Or not, If yes, it can become one of the brands in that consumer's regular brand repertoire, with an ongoing habit of buying or using P, often formed almost instantly. For this to occur, the new P would only need to seem about as good as the other brands in the consumer's wider brand repertoire or consideration set.
No unique or deep commitment or conversion to P is needed or likely (McWilliam, 1997), with no strong persuasion needed. Hedges' hit-or-miss adoption process of a brand coming into one's salient consideration set (or not) has been likened to cosmic radiation leading to a genetic mutation "by chance," followed by natural selection, with very few of the new mutants surviving as "fit enough."
A Brand's Place In A Repertoire
For any individual buyer some brands are more salient than others are and, in a repertoire, some are bought more often. This will be a consequence of the many "reinforcers," often small, which can act upon a buyer over time (Foxall, 1996), e.g., aspects of distribution, product features, advertising, etc. Even for highly competitive brands that match each other's advantages, individual features do differ in various "minor" ways. Advertising can help in this even by merely publicizing the brand name. This can remind consumers of their own personal reasons for considering that brand.
How Salience Works: No Deep Commitment
When a brand accumulates salience for the consumer, it almost never is the consumer's only salient one. Over a series of purchases, consumers are mostly polygamous. In repertoire markets, a salient brand seems seldom to play a unique role for its customers--no deep commitment. Loyalty (or strictly, split-loyalty) is much the same from brand to brand--it's just the number of loyal buyers that varies greatly. Each brand is bought quite infrequently by most of its customers. For frequently bought branded goods or services, a brand's customers mostly buy the other brands in their repertoires in total more often: "Your customers are mostly other brands' customers who occasionally buy you."
What each brand's customers feel about the brands they know and use generally also does not vary idiosyncratically from brand to brand. It may seem surprising, but competitive brands differ little in how many of their customers say it "Tastes Nice," is "Good Value for Money," or "A Brand I Trust."
Far more people say "A brand I trust" about the leading brand than for the sixth brand (27 percent versus 6 percent). These differences are what most marketing people seem to note, but they are misleading. The reactions of the users of each brand are much more similar. The second line of Table 1 shows that typically about 45 percent of users for any brand say that their brand is one they trust.
The highly varying population responses in the top line were misleading because they merely reflect that big brands have more users, with brand users being more likely to say positive things about their brand (Barwise and Ehrenberg, 1970).
Evaluative attitudes ("Tastes nice" or "A brand I trust") are therefore generally found to be much the same among users of competitive brands, with just a well-established small Double Jeopardy trend with market share--here from 48 percent for the top brand I down to 37 percent for IV.
Brand-users' beliefs about their brands are therefore similar. This can be explained by the measures reflecting what consumers believe about the product-category as a whole (i.e., any brand). If they use a specific brand, they tend to see their product-beliefs as applying to that brand.
The exceptions are certain functionally "descriptive" characteristics of a particular brand, which tend also to be noted by its non-users (like Rice Krispies "Staying crisp in milk")--or a replay of some emphatic advertising slogan.
Distinctiveness, Not Brand Differentiation
The perceived sameness of competitive brands has often been noted over the years, e.g., by James Webb Young early in the last century:
* A good deal of contemporary consumer advertising reflects brand differences that are so slight that one may wonder whether consumers will consider them to add distinctive value to the brand (Weilbacher, 1993).
* There is a danger that in searching for something different to say you end up basing advertising on small or meaningless claims (Keeble, 1998).
Nonetheless, this commodity-like similarity of competitive brands tends still to be seen as regrettable news:
Each marketing generation continues to believe that there was, until only very recently, some golden period when all products [i.e., brands] were not only demonstrably different from each other but also, wondrously, better than each other (Bullmore, 1998). Indeed, most practitioner and academic opinion is that consumers need a "reason" to choose a specific brand.
Marketers, therefore, widely regard brand differentiation as vital. If no functional differences exist, distinct "Added Values" need to be specially created for the brand--different values for each different brand:
* This use of advertising--to add a subjective value to the product--becomes increasingly important (Young, 1923).
* It is obvious that consumer perceptions of differences between brands caused by advertising are [widely thought to be] the essence of the advertising opportunity (Weilbacher, 1993).
The orthodox view therefore seems to be that advertisements should carry or imply "selling-points" (i.e., they should proffer added values), which will enable consumers to choose between brand A and brand B.
Yet when we deconstructed and tested advertising messages as noted earlier, they were often seen as only providing "talking-points"--ways of saying something about the brand and creatively publicizing it-and not "selling points," seen as differentiating the brands.
As stressed by Moran (1990), creative advertising people themselves often do not subscribe to the notion that consumers need a persuasive message or differentiating "brand values." Many of the advertisements that they produce--and that their managements and clients accept and run--do not explicitly articulate strong brand differentiation. Instead, they mostly say, "Coke Is It," "X Gets Clothes Clean," or show a car driven along a mountain road.
As briefly illustrated in Table 1, there is little evidence that their users as such see brands as possessing differentiating added values. Even the protagonists of the brand- values theories do not seem to give operational definitions or substantiated examples.
Choosing between competitive brands is therefore usually quick and easy (e.g., Miller and Berry, 1998; Heath, 2001) compared with the quite difficult choices between functionally different product variants (a coupe or a SUV, a faster versus a less costly processor, a lemon or mango flavor, etc.). We believe that is why advertising as a weak force (i.e., mere publicity) can actually influence brand choice at all--it is a choice between close substitutes.
Sales Effects
Brand maintenance as the main outcome The main aim of advertising is usually taken to be "Growth." The looked-for advertising effectiveness is therefore almost always identified with extra sales, higher margins, added values, or more favorable attitudes.
Not Every Brand Can Grow Its Share
Yet growth as the target has mostly remained unquestioned. And so advertising has famously remained unaccountable: "Advertising is bewildering because currently [sic!], no one knows what advertising really does in the market place" (Lilien, Kotler, and Moorthy, 1992). But Kotler and his colleagues continued, rather exceptionally: "'What advertising is supposed to do is fairly clear...to increase company sales and/or profits over what they would otherwise be."
This means to us that competitive brands should mostly not lose sales if they are advertised. Advertising may at times be followed by a sales increase (e.g., Abraham and Lodish, 1987). But these tend to be short-lived ups-and-downs, since few advertised brands' market shares increase for long. Such "short-term" advertising does not pay for itself (Ephron, 2001), otherwise advertisers would advertise more.
Our conjecture--which could be tested--is that the extra short-term sales are due to briefly refreshed brand awareness. This would mostly occur if the brand was already in that consumer's brand-repertoire (advertising being noticed and liked far more by brand users than non-users).
Occasionally a campaign will cut through and seem to greatly boost sales--the stuff of creative advertising awards. It often contains no selling propositions. As Jones (1997) notes, with apparent surprise: "The advertisements shown to have greatest effect were certainly not hard-selling in the conventional sense. The expectation is that competitors will gain if you do not market your own brand effectively.
If your brand has 10 percent of the market (which is quite a lot), it nonetheless has 90 percent of the market against it. That means roughly 90 percent of all the distribution efforts, display, advertising, promotion, word-of-mouth, after-sales service, added values, quality-control, sales training, CRM, etc., in the category. Keeping each brand in competitive near-equilibrium or even stalemate has to be the main realistic marketing aim for established brands. It is what mostly happens, whatever marketers tend to say about growth. The occasional larger gain is a bonus for a fortunate few--perhaps those who "get everything right," not just their advertising.
Brand maintenance may not appear very macho as a goal. But top management continues year after year to allocate--perhaps reluctantly--big advertising budgets in markets that remain stubbornly steady. This seems to recognize advertising's primarily defensive role.
Evaluating Advertising
It is because of the lack of obvious longer-term sales gains that marketers put in place detailed tracking systems to try to evaluate their advertising effectiveness: "U&A" and brand image tracking, or, in modern parlance, equity monitors. The concept of salience has implications for such research:
* Traditional awareness measures are inadequate, as no matter how these are implemented ("top of mind," etc.), they only tap the link between the brand name and the product category cue.
* Instruments that seek to document how well the brand's image conforms to some ideal make unwarranted causal assumptions about the effects of what buyers feel about the brand and what they do.
* Multi-attribute attitudinal models largely assume salience rather than diagnose it.
* "Persuasion shifts" may largely or wholly reflect refreshed awareness.
* More attention needs to be paid to how many relevant consumers think of the brand, and how often or how likely they are to do so, rather than to what they feel about it (which will not differ much from brand to brand, for brand users).
Much work is needed on advertising evaluation: to remove the sole focus on growth for every advertiser, to shake off the vestiges of 1960s attitude psychology (Foxall, 1996), and to develop adequate measures of salience.
For such measures to be useful in advertising evaluation there needs to be some evidence of links to both advertising (i.e., sensitivity to changes in advertising) and to subsequent buyer behavior. This may be technically hard. But the biggest hurdle is for "no-change" brand maintenance to become accepted as the basic criterion of advertising success: "Having to run hard to stand still."
Concluding Discussion
The publicity perspective of advertising, which we have sought to outline in this paper, does not of course explain everything. But it can unify many of advertising's diverse aspects.
Within this framework, advertising theory and practice hang together better and both make more sense. Thus the traditional advertising goal of effective persuasion--prevailing upon people to change their attitudes or feelings--has long been found very difficult to achieve (e.g., Moran, 1990). Few will, however, question that even five seconds' publicity for a brand can successfully remind people of it. And those 30 seconds can probably do so better, with more impact on refreshing memory traces for the brand, or even perhaps enhancing them or linking up a new one.
Ongoing and substantial change with sustained growth in market share--the supposed outcome of persuasive advertising--is rarely reported for established brands. It is, in any case, impossible for every brand. Consumers themselves have long felt free to say that they have "never been influenced by advertising," since only rarely do they change what they feel or do about established brands.
Nonetheless, both academic textbooks and practitioners' pronouncements continue to say or imply that changing what people feel is what advertising is supposed to do. Hence, persuasive brand advertising has mostly failed when it is judged by its own goal, i.e., growth through persuasion. The advertising industry, as well as management generally, ought to face up to that and change the goalposts. With profitable brand maintenance as a goal, everyone can win, with occasionally the bonus of some lasting extra sales perhaps.
Brand advertising seen as creative publicity can succeed--and often does. Even for an established brand, publicity can successfully remind the experienced consumer of the brand and help to counter its many competitors' overwhelming availability, at much the same quality and prices. In this threatening competitive context, publicity can help to maintain the number of people to whom the brand is broadly "Salient," the term we are using for the brand coming to mind, being familiar, safe, and satisfying (i.e., being "good enough").
Advertising's Differing Tasks
Advertising is generally expected to fulfill several very different tasks, sometimes more or less simultaneously:
1. To promote a new brand
2. To entice additional recruits to an established brand
3. To encourage that brand's existing clientele to stay
4. To tempt these existing customers to buy it more
There are also the different tasks of the brand motivating its own (sales) staff through its advertising, as well as enthusing its suppliers and its retailers. Yet differing advertising tasks can be involved when pursuing investors, sponsors, business-to-business customers, e-commerce, politicians, or general PR.
With the persuasive view of advertising these different tasks would seem to require different strategies, tactics, copy, and execution perhaps (e.g., Anschuetz, 2002). It can tell and remind people of the brand, letting them bring their own associations and needs to the issue. Some people fear that this "mere publicity" stance is unhelpful to creatives. Advertising a better mousetrap is fairly easy if it is in fact a bit better. This seems the hallmark of good advertising as we know it. We think still that advertising a competitive brand means just "Telling a brand story well" (Ehrenberg, 1974), without there being just one solution. There is huge scope--the campaign need not be hemmed in by the brand's "selling proposition."
It is not that consumers' feelings or rational thoughts about the brand do not matter. But that they cannot be easily influenced, as they tend to be much the same among users of each competitive brand. ("Users of brand A think or feel about A much what users of brand B think or feel about B.") What seems to differ between different brands is not what their users feel about them, but how many people feel it.
This differs from Dr. Johnson's much quoted but mistaken view that "Promise, large Promise, is the soul of an advertisement" (even if he just meant puffery). It differs also from James Webb Young's more recent decree in 1923 that for "Advertising to add a subjective value to the product becomes increasingly important."
Finally, it differs from Gardner and Levy's opening of their 1955 classic: "Basic to many of the problems of advertising and selling is the question of the consumer's ... conception of the brand."
Our contrary thesis is that advertising and selling do not depend on consumers seeing the brand as different, but upon the brand being seen at all, i.e., as broadly salient and therefore being in the consumers' individual consideration sets. That has long been treated as a necessary condition for choosing a brand (from say Howard and Sheth, 1969, onwards).
Our overall conclusion is that from the publicity perspective, advertising practice need generally not change. The notion "Creative Publicity" already seems to reflect what most advertising in fact does.
What would need to change is the way advertising is generally thought of, talked about, and evaluated. Instead of trying to persuade experienced consumers that every advertised brand is better or best, we should accept that advertising mostly needs to refresh, and may occasionally enhance, acceptance of the brand as one to buy and/or to consider.
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