Current advertising approach failing?

Advertisers locked into ‘old thinking’ about how people react to ads

The Australian newspaper has reported how ‘Ads fail to connect’. New research shows it is far more important to consider how you leave people feeling about a brand than what you can tell them about it.

BUT advertisers continue to talk to audiences as though they will respond to ads in a “logical and rational fashion..(because)…traditional theories of advertising effectiveness have strongly dismissed the importance of emotional reactions to advertisements.”

A study by Luma – a Melbourne research company specialising in consumer insights – looked at 4500 ads and responses from more than 230,000 consumers around the world.

We all ‘confabulate’!
The research – which has been nominated by the World Association of Research Professionals for research paper of the year – claims to have found key flaws in how our reactions to advertising has been researched in the past.

What we say to researchers is often made up on the spur of the moment, because we want to appear rational. The report says it’s not being dishonest, it’s just something we do unconsciously, making up answers when we’re put on the spot and we just don’t know (or are unsure?).

It’s the same around the world
Luma compiled the research while pre-testing ads for clients in 43 countries. There was no significant differences in the findings between countries or even product categories. They found that:

• It is not enough for companies to produce advertisements that simply grab an audience’s attention and provide new information about the brand.
• At a global level, across all ads and across all countries there are many similarities in how people feel about a brand.
• Across the board, just 25 per cent of ads tested grabbed people’s attention, while just 33 per cent generated any positive feelings about the brand.
• You have to know whether an ad will generate feelings because a lot won’t. It comes back to finding those little triggers that do really make people feel positive about a particular brand.

New understanding about the brain
Historically there has been a lot of talk about emotions in advertising, but there has not been a lot of empirical evidence to show if this is actually true, in an advertising or brand sense.

Luma is now producing the evidence! The report says “In the past, we had a much more rational view about brands, advertising and explaining why people bought the items they did. It was presumed that all behaviour was conscious, sequential and rational.” This older approach now appears rather inadequate.

WHAT do you think of this? It makes sense to me to tap into emotions if you want to convince someone of something’s worth. Are you going to rethink your latest marketing strategy?