An Investigation into the Recall of Persuasive versus Informative Television Advertisements

Abstract

Advertising has a pretty simple role: to persuade consumers to buy the company’s product while creating awareness about it. Advertising spam is on the rise in television primetime. It is becoming easier and easier for consumers to tune out advertisements and not pay attention to the message. So the question is: which advertisements “stick” to the consumers’ minds and actually lead to intent to purchase? This study attempts to analyze this by investigating recall differences between two broad categories of advertisements: “persuasive” and “informative” and eventual purchase intent differences that arise due to the advertisements. The study was an experiment, with 45 participants, asked to view a half hour documentary interrupted with four intervals of 12 advertisements, equal ratio of persuasive and informative advertisements. A comparison of mean recall scores using the t-test showed a significantly higher recall score for persuasive advertisements than for informative advertisements. The difference in purchase intent resulting from the two categories of advertisements was negligible.

Keywords: Advertising, Persuasion, Recall, Purchase Intent

Introduction

By investing in advertising, marketers strive to induce additional sales of their product by making consumers aware of their brand and persuading them of its superiority. Therefore, advertising has a pretty simple role: to persuade consumers to buy the company’s product while creating awareness about it.

The battle of advertising continues beyond persuasion. It is observed that the top brands continuously advertise to keep themselves in the mind of the consumer; a distinguished place among other brands. Their brand name is the first that should come to mind ...

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