Advertising research

Advertising Research - Definition

Definition: Research conducted to improve the efficacy of advertising. It may focus on a specific ad or campaign, or may be directed at a more general understanding of how advertising works or how consumers use the information in advertising. It can entail a variety of research approaches, including psychological, sociological, economic, and other perspectives.
(Source: http://marketing.about.com/od/marketingglossary/g/advresearchdef.htm )

Advertising has many options and advertisers and advertising agencies have to choose best the portfolio among these options to maximize the benefit of advertising spend for the organization.

Kotler in his 9th edition quoted Forrester statement that no more than 1/5 of 1% of total advertising expenditure was being used to achieve understanding of spending the remaining money.  It is important to do an advertising campaign in one or two cities first and evaluate its impact to take a decision to roll it as a national campaign.

Kotler pointed out that communication effect research and sales effect research can be two categories of advertising research.

Communication-effect research

It is used to test whether the ad is communicating effectively. It is also known as copy testing. It can be done before placing the ad in the media or after its appearance in the press. Three major methods are used in it. One direct testing where the opinion of the participant is asked for a particular advertisement. In portfolio test, number of advertisement are shown to the participant and he is asked to recall the advertisements. In the third category of laboratory tests, the participants are shown the ads and their physiological responses like heart beat, blood pressure, pupil dilation etc. are measured.

Sales-effect research

In this type of research, experimental designs with various advertisements and levels of expenditures can be done in selected places and the variation in sales among the territories or places can be analyzed to find out which advertisements effective in increasing the sales.

Source

Philip Kotler, Marketing Management,

Research Papers on Advertising Research

The Psychological Impact of Advertising on the Consumer, 2008 research paper, Sandra Jakstiene et al.