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Jurnal Of Advertising

International Journal of Market Research Vol. 47 Issue 5

Measuring the hidden power of emotive advertising
Robert Heath
Bath School of Management

Pam Hyder
Marketing Consultant

Winner: 2004 David Winton Award for Best Technical Paper Winner: 2004 ISBA Award for Best Paper on Advertising Research

This paper is about advertising that works on our emotions without necessarily achieving high levels of attention or recall. We compare the most popular recallbased metric – claimed ad awareness – against an approach that deduces effectiveness from recognition, and find claimed ad awareness seriously underestimates the effectiveness of the advertising tested.

Introduction
In 1961, in response to Vance Packard’s famous polemic The Hidden Persuaders, Rosser Reeves (1961) declared: ‘There are no hidden persuaders. Advertising works openly, in the bare and pitiless sunlight.’ Doubtless there are some who believe that this is still the case, and that the way advertising works is totally transparent. But we know a lot more about how our minds and our brains work than we did 40 years ago, and what we have learned confirms that advertising, indeed communication in general, is a far more complex process than we used to think it was. What complicates everything is not claims or brands or products, but emotions — specifically, our emotions as consumers. When Rosser Reeves made his pronouncement it was believed that emotions were a consequence of our thoughts, and that if we understood what we were thinking then we understood everything. But pioneers in psychology like Robert Zajonc and Robert Bornstein shattered this illusion in the 1980s. They showed that feelings and emotions have primacy over thoughts, and that emotional responses can be created even when we have no awareness

© 2005 The Market Research Society

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Measuring the hidden power of emotive advertising

of the stimulus that causes them. More recently, Antonio Damasio (1994) has proved that...