How Advertising Works: What Do We Really Know?

Abstract

The authors review more than 250 journal articles and books to establish what is and should be known about how advertising affects the consumer-how it works. They first deduce a taxonomy of models, discuss the theoretical principles of each class of models, and summarize their empirical findings. They then synthesize five generalizations about how advertising works and propose directions for further research. Advertising effects are classified into intermediate effects, for example, on consumer beliefs and attitudes, and behavioral effects, which relate to purchasing behavior, for example, on brand choice. The generalizations suggest that there is little support for any hierarchy, in the sense of temporal sequence, of effects. The authors propose that advertising effects should be studied in a space, with affect, cognition, and experience as the three dimensions. Advertising's positioning in this space should be determined by context, which reflects advertising's goal diversity, product category, competition, other aspects of mix, stage of product life cycle, and target market.

A longitudinal examination of the impact of quality perception gap on brand performance in the US Automotive Industry

“…We specifically focus on four marketing signals: price, advertising expenditure, warranty, and distribution network. An increase in price usually hampers performance (e.g., Tellis 1988) whereas the impact of an increase in advertising expenditures is expected to be positive on a brand's performance (e.g., Assmus et al 1984;Vakratsas and Ambler 1999). Furthermore, an increase in warranty offering or expansion in the distribution network contributes positively to the value proposition of a brand and, thus, is expected to affect its performance positively (Padmanabhan and Rao 1993;Purohit 1997).…”

Cause‐related marketing: a new perspective on achieving campaign objectives amongst fast moving consumer goods

“…The first and most enduring of these is AIDA: Awareness → Interest → Desire → Action (Strong, 1925). These theories contend that sales promotions are capable of eliciting a desire for a particular product based on a 'think, feel and do' sequence of events in consumer processing of promotional messages (Vakratsas and Ambler, 1999). Thus, the 'persuasion' school advances the theory that it is possible to manipulate consumers into purchase via the use of a variety of marketing communications tools, including sales promotion.…”

“…Whilst persuasion theories are founded on the 'think, feel and do' sequence of events in consumer processing of promotional messages, the salience or 'weak' theories offer an alternative sequence: namely, 'think, do and feel' (Vakratsas and Ambler, 1999;Jones, 1990). This theory is derived from the observation that consumers develop attitudes towards products after they have had experience of using them.…”

Modeling heterogeneous effective advertising stock using single-source data

“…In the literature, many studies, using aggregated data, have explored whether or not advertising threshold effects exist, e.g., Lambin (1976), Simon and Arndt (1980), Bemmaor (1984), Bronnenberg (1998), Steiner (1987), Vakratsas and Ambler (1999), Hanssen et al (2001), and Vakratsas et al (2004). Recently, Dube et al (2005) proposed equilibrium models and discussed advertising threshold effects using aggregate data.…”