Awareness Fallacy

I've been making a bit of a return recently to some of the basics of advertising and research theory. In particular I wanted to address the resilient popularity of recall mesasures as an assessment of effectiveness in the US market.

Here's a consolidation of the main arguments against its use:


2 comments:

Nick said...

An Interesting presentation. However a few of thoughts.

AIDA comes from a sales process,

1) The "A" stands for Attention not awareness. There is a big difference
2) No one (at least no one who understands AIDA) has ever suggested that Awareness converts to interest, rather they are prerequisites - that is to say one can not have interest before one has gained attention. It is arguable whether that is true, but nonetheless the point you make about the relationship is incorrect.
3) I would not describe AIDA as the traditional advertising model. It has been a long time since I have heard anyone suggest AIDA with a straight face, It was invented in the 'twenties and our understanding of how communication and advertising works, as you point out, has become a lot more sophisticated

PS I really like your blog, it is wonderfully thought provoking

Mark Lester said...

Hi Nick, thanks. Still a fledgling blog so the positive comment is gratefully received.

On your first and second points, take your argument on attention versus awareness, a bit of fudge to use the two interchangeably.

On your third, by including AIDA at the start of the presentation perhaps I've appeared to narrow my argument down more than I intended. Whilst AIDA might not be explicitly referred to often within advertising these days, it is one variant of a number of stage theories (which are resilient) that assume that consumers must be aware of advertising, which can affect their attitudes and in turn affect their behavior.

I tried to use AIDA as a specific example of this type of approach and to demonstrate that awareness is neither necessary nor sufficient to predict changes to behavior.

Hope you'll follow at my new location...

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