How much attention do consumers pay to ads? How much do consumers really care about what those ads say? And, how much will the amount of information affect a product’s ability to draw purchasers?
These are all questions Dr. George Franke, professor and Reese Phifer Fellow of Marketing, and Dr. David Mothersbaugh, associate professor of marketing and Board of Visitors Research Fellow, had concerning the economics of advertising.
The pair, from the Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration, along with Dr. Bruce Huhmann, assistant professor of marketing at New Mexico State University, began an investigation with the idea of presenting new information to the public.
Franke has done work in the past on a number of studies that looked at how much information advertising contains, using a measurement approach that looks at price, quality, durability, taste, nutrition, etc. The goal of each of the previous studies was to tell how much of those types of information appears in advertising. To their knowledge, however, no one had looked at how people respond to the above-mentioned types of information.
Using Starch readership scores—a research service that measures what percentage of people who saw a magazine or newspaper read a particular ad—the team began their work.
“We got a sample of magazines that had been Starched. We got a measure of information content and trained some coders in how to measure information and they went through the magazines [in which] we had covered up the readership scores,” Franke said.
“We measured the information. Starch had measured the readership, so we looked at the relationship. Does more information cause more people to read the ad?” Franke said.
The team broke down the goods whose ads they would study into three large groups: search goods (such as clothing or perfume, where a customer can try out an item before they buy it); experience convenience goods (such as food or toiletries, which customers must buy, eat, or live with the product and cannot try out a product or service before they pay for it); and, experience shopping goods (such as a new car, where customers shop before their purchase).
“Our findings suggest that advertisers should consider putting more information on average in print ads for search products, because it tends to have a more positive effect on ad readership than information in ads for experience products. Of course, it is not a universal law. Depending on the skill of the copywriter and the interests of the target audience, providing information may help or hurt the success of an advertising campaign in any product category,” the researchers said.