5 limitations in traditional measures of marketing effectiveness

In an earlier post, we looked at the vital role emotions play in decision making. Before we look at some of the emerging technologies that can help marketers get to those feelings and emotions, let’s take a look at the approaches to measuring marketing effectiveness which are being used at the moment.

Traditional approaches have tended to rely on focus groups and quantitative ad tests. These tend to involve self reported feelings and emotions, verbal questions and answers and, more recently, moment-to-moment emotional responses reported utilising dials and picture scales.

While these approaches have strengths, put very simply they also have a number of limitations:

• People are often not aware of what they feel, of why they feel a certain way or why they make a certain choice. Yet they can always provide an answer. The question is: are we really getting at the truth?
• People may not wish to reveal their inner secrets to someone else if they believe that perhaps their feelings are not socially acceptable to the others they are talking with
• Focus groups and quantitative ad tests are very reliant on words and introspection. More recently facial recognition ‘emoticons’ and dials seek to overcome the verbal bias. However, these are also post cognitive and have their limitations with the person still having to reflect – or cognitively process - how they feel before selecting the picture or turning the dial
• Question and answer has limited effectiveness because emotions are processed in a part of the brain which does not have direct access to words. What is said about feelings and emotions is filtered and therefore potentially changed in ways that make it very hard to interpret

Similar issues apply to advertising research. In addition:

• For advertising to influence choice requires enduring, relevant and personally meaningful memories to be laid down which are linked to the brand. Brand-linked long term memories need to be created if advertising is to be acted upon later at the point of brand choice.

In focus groups and quantitative ad tests, people are often asked to recall elements of the ad that they like or dislike, or that stand out, and this is used as a measure of effectiveness and memorability. However, according to some research, emotional memories are not well recalled in spontaneous recall tests of memory such as brand prompted ad awareness and spontaneous ad recall. Whilst these are effective measures of what comes out of memory, they do not measure what goes into memory which is much more important in real life conditions of advertising and brand exposure and choice. Since it is becoming more widely understood that effectively putting down long term memories is significantly enhanced by emotion, marketers are recognising the need for direct physiological measures of emotional response in order to get to the ‘heart’ of decision making about their brands.

In our next post, we’ll take a detailed look at why physiological measures represent a significant step forward for research and marketing measurement.