Three Approacheses To Advertising Research: Approaches In Advertising

Approaches in Advertising Research

There are so many types of advertising, thus there are large number of approaches for analyzing advertising. The most prevalent type of research advertising is copy testing. The research focuses on things such as design, color, layout, narration, music, size, length, illustration and more.

As Wimmer & Dominick (2000: 347):

Copy testing is the research which helps develop effective advertisements and then determines which of several advertisements is the most effective.

A way to explain the methods in copy testing research is considering the dimensions of persuasion by Leckenby and Wedding (1982). The three dimensions, appropriate to copy testing research:

• cognitive dimension

• affective dimension

• conative

In other words, what do consumers know about a product, service or concept after they have been exposed to advertising messages. The researchers use variety of methods for collecting such information (focus groups, physiological studies and consumer panels). In other cases, pretest and posttest are involved in a research, while some research involves only posttest measurements.

Advertising research in the affective dimension - investigates how consumers’ attitude for a particular product/service has changed because of advertisement exposure. The data is gathered in variety of ways which includes focus groups, central location testing, telephone studies, and varieties of physiological measurements.

Advertising research in the conative dimension - deals with the consumer behavior, particularly the intention to purchase and the actual purchasing behavior. In the buying predisposition research, the consumers are asked their probability of purchasing a service or product presented in an advertising campaign. In these studies, the actual sales are tracked when consumers are exposed to advertisements. Advertising Research includes a variety of approaches such as

As noted in Wimmer & Dominick (2000: 354-355), in order to test the assumption that the advertising research does identify advertising that works well in the marketplace, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), carried on a research validity project for determining effective copy testing measures (Haley & Baldinger, 1991). In the beginning begin, ARF selected 5 pairs of TV commercials. As one of the ads in these pairs had been already shown for producing major sales difference in test markets, the ARF researchers used ads in the field experiment which included common copy testing