Chapter 15

Measuring the Effectiveness of Brand Promotions

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1. Discuss issues that shape the evaluation of brand promotion.2. Describe how marketers measure the effectiveness of advertising.3. Identify measures of effectiveness for Internet advertising, direct

marketing, sales promotion, point-of-purchase, sponsorships, public relations, and corporate advertising.

4. Explain how sales managers evaluate salespeople and the personal-selling effort.

5. Describe the process of evaluating the effectiveness of IMC campaigns.

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Issues in Measuring Effectiveness

• First among the issues to consider when exploring the measurement of promotion’s effectiveness is the scope of promotion research. • Marketers must determine whether research meets the criteria of:

• reliability• validity• trustworthiness• meaningfulness

• Research that is based on custom and history should be avoided.• Account planning is a system used to analyze the research data for projects. It differs from traditional promotion research in three

ways:• organization• prominent role of research• tendency towards qualitative and naturalistic research

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Issues in Measuring Effectiveness, Continued

• Message evaluation is an attempt to gain some assurance that the promotional message is doing essentially what it is supposed to do.

• Clients often want normative test scores, however this isn’t always the most appropriate or effective way to evaluate a message. Often qualitative (rather than quantitative) information is better suited to the task.

• Marketers must develop criteria to evaluate the research’s usefulness. These criteria assess whether the message:

• imparts knowledge• shapes attitudes• attaches emotions• legitimizes the brand (resonance testing)

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Effectiveness of Advertisements

• The methods for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising generally take the form of pretesting, pilot testing, and post-testing.

• Pretest evaluations are instituted before advertisements are placed and include: • Communication tests• Magazine dummies• Theater tests• Thought listings• Attitude change studies• Physiological measures (eye-tracking systems, psychogalvanometer, brain wave tracking, voice response analysis)

• Pretest advantages include providing data before a campaign begins so adjustments can be made and saving companies from running ineffective or embarrassing ads. Disadvantages include feedback that fails to separate responses to the ad from responses to the brand and feedback that tells only how stimulating an ad is.

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Effectiveness of Advertisements, Continued

• Pilot tests are instituted in the field and include: • Split-cable transmission• Split-run transmission• Split-list experiments

• The advantage of pilot testing is the natural environment in which the testing takes place. A disadvantage is that the environment cannot be controlled and competing influences may distract subjects.

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Effectiveness of Advertisements, Continued

• Post-testing assesses performance during or after the launch of an advertising campaign. Techniques include:

• Recall testing• Recognition testing• Awareness and attitude tracking• Behavior-based measures

• Advantages include the real-world setting. Disadvantages include expense, delay of feedback, and inability to separate souces.

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Identifying Measures of Effectiveness

• Internet advertising—hits, click-throughs, page views, visits, unique visitors• Web measurement tools—log analysis software• Direct marketing—inquiry/response measures• Sales promotions and point-of-purchase—Consumer sales: ballot method, sales

measures. Trade Sales: surveys, sales measures• Sponsorship and supportive communications—probably shouldn’t be measured at all,

may be measured through event attendance or number of views if televised• PR and corporate advertising—probably shouldn’t be measured, may be measured

through media counts and changes in awareness

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Effectiveness of Personal Selling

• These measurements include both objective and subjective criteria. • Results must be carefully viewed within the context of the overall sales picture and

consider both long- and short-term effects.• Measuring the effectiveness of sales personnel is important for several reasons:

• salespeople need feedback so they can adjust future efforts• management needs a basis on which to make annual salary and bonus

decisions• provides a primary source for internal situation analysis

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Effectiveness of the IMC Program

• One approach to measuring the effectiveness of the overall IMC program is to measure each of the promotional tools used in a campaign as if it were independent of the others. This fragmented approach fails to account for the synergies that are the hallmark of IMC campaigns.

• A second approach is to use single-source tracking measures, which identify the extent to which a sample of consumers has potentially been exposed to multiple promotional messages.

• A third alternative proposed by practitioners suggests measuring media exposures, product (brand) impressions, and personal contacts as a basis for determining the overall effect of an IMC program.

• Measuring the interaction of all elements of the promotional mix elements is extremely complicated and likely beyond the methodological tools available at this time.

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