Ad research denounced as largely useless

29/August/2001

In a highly readable 124-page Admap monograph entitled The Hidden Power of Advertising, Heath contends that conventional advertising research methods, based on measures of awareness and recall, are to a large extent useless.

This is because of the inadequacy of what he calls the Cartesian model of advertising in which ads work by persuading the conscious mind of the merits of the things advertised.

Like a number of other recent writers about marketing and advertising, notably Giep Franzen in the Netherlands and Erik du Plessis in South Africa, the British Heath has taken the trouble to read up on modern neurological theories of memory.

The subtitle of his book is How low involvement processing influences the way we choose brands, and it sums up Heath's view of how much advertising, especially on TV, achieves its effect. He puts forward 17 rules for how the Low Involvement Processing Model works. They are, in abbreviated form, as follows.

1. Most consumers believe most reputable brands perform similarly.
2. Consequently they choose brands not on rational grounds but according to subconscious "markers".
3. They pay little conscious attention to advertising.
4. Active learning, or high involvement processing, produces enduring attitude changes.
5. However, most of us tend to process most media passively.
6. Despite appearances TV is a relatively low attention medium.
7. Advertisers try to get around this with attention-getting devices.
8. However, consumers' perceptual filtering blocks these except where they are integrated with the message of the ad.
9. Information can be acquired passively by implicit learning, a subsconscious process that uses automatic processing and feeds into implicit memory.
10. Such memory stores perceptions and simple concepts only.
11. Info can also be acquired semi-consciously via shallow processing. Together shallow and automatic processing make up low involvement processing.
12. Most ads are processed using low involvement processing.
13. Implicitly learned perceptual and conceptual elements are stored as associations with the brand.
14. Implicit learning is used every time you see or hear an ad irrespective of how much conscious attenion you give it or whether you love or loathe it.
15. Ads processed with high involvement are outnumbered by up to 50 times by low involvement ads.
16. Implicit memory, though building more slowly than explicit memory, it is more durable.
17. If a brand association triggers an emotional marker, consumers can be strongly influenced towards the brand without realising it.

Heath provides many case histories that he thinks prove his points. Among them is that of Stella Artois beer, advertising for which in the UK never gained high awareness. Nevertheless the brand achieved great sales success undoubtedly, says Heath, as a result of its "reassuringly expensive" ad campaign.

Other examples are given to back up another of Heath's contentions, namely that the way questions are asked can alter the memory of respondents. He also has a go at focus groups, where he says the very act of asking people to talk about ads distorts their responses to those same ads.

Heath predicts that in the near future traditional ad research methods will be abandoned. "If consumers find it hard to recall where and when they saw an ad now, how much harder will it be when new media like the Internet are as common in our households as the TV?...So we will turn away from direct research questions to indirect questions from which findings can be deduced."

Heath, aged 53, has worked in marketing (starting at Unilever), advertising and research. He was recently head of UK operations for the German research agency Icon before leaving to set up his own brand positioning consultancy, the Value Creatiion Company.

Copies of The Hidden Power of Advertising can be obtained, price £45 plus p&p, from Admap Publications, Farm Road, Henley-onThames, Oxfordshire RG9 1EJ, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1491 411000. Fax: +44 (0) 1491 418600. E-mail: info@warc.com.

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