Strategic Evaluation of How Advertising Works On Product Promotions

Over the years, there have been contentious and controversial debates on how advertising works, that has continue to stimulate intellectual research. The issues involved are diverse as they relate to advertising messages exposure, persuasion, conviction and the impact on consumers’ attitudes and behaviours in their decisions on purchase of products. As a corollary, consumers have to be aware of an existing product to satisfy needs, and this could necessitate the recall from memory of any, or search for information that may stimulate the interest to initiate decisions on purchase action. Starch (1966) argues that advertising calls attention and informs people about products via mass media by establishing a favourable or preferential association link between a need and a brand name, and as the need arises the name will come to mind with favourable or preferential image established (a) through repeat advertising and (b) satisfactory use performance of the product. Hence advertising leads to buying action because of (a) the existing preferential image, (b) the attention directing and reminding process and (c) the persuasive – activating power of the image. In a similar vein, Batra et al (1998:121) argue that usually, advertising is not well suited to directly precipitate action, rather, it is better at conducting some communication, association or persuasion task that will hopefully result in the desired action being precipitated. There have been attempts to establish standards for evaluation of how advertising works based on communication principles and models such as AIDA (strong (1925:9) Hierarchy of Effects (Lavidge et al (1961:61) Innovation Adoption (Rogers (1962:79-82) DAGMAR (Colley (1961) and Elaborative Likelihood model (Petty et al (1983:3-23). These models tended to support the principles of repetition of messages, recognition, comprehension, standardization and action. In this discussion on how advertising works, the approach was to review advertising and the variables that influences consumer attitudes and behaviours, though highly unpredictable, but provides an insight to consumers’ reactions to advertising messages. Keywords: Advertising, Product, Promotion