Since the advent of the internet, much speculation has ensued regarding its tangible benefits to business. This article looks at the effectiveness of email advertising to promote information to consumers. Within this email promotion context, and using data from a survey of 838 female Finnish consumers of a major international cosmetics brand, we investigate consumer perceptions of email advertising. Specifically, within an exploratory research context we address two research questions: (1) What email advertising factors may influence visits to the company website? and (2) What email advertising factors may influence visits to a physical (i.e., bricks-and-mortar) company sales outlet? Results suggest that email advertisers should strive to generate emails that are perceived as useful. Useful emails appear to influence consumers to visit the store primarily to either buy the product or view the product firsthand, rather than visit the company website. However, as consumers could not buy the advertised products from the website, these findings should be regarded as preliminary. Factors influencing perceptions of email advertising usefulness are explored along with limitations and future research directions.

This article introduces a moment-by-moment picture-sorting technique for measuring the emotional content of TV commercials. This new dynamic approach to analyzing the dramatic structure of commercials is shown to be a valid predictor of purchase intent.

This article introduces an Advanced Brand Valuation (ABV) model that combines the psychological strength of a brand in the mind of its consumers with accepted accounting practices to determine the true financial value of a brand. ABV is a modular approach that integrates common marketing research metrics into financial calculations and meets standards for tax and financial reporting purposes. (Sattler, H., S. Högl, and O. Hupp. “Evaluation of the Financial Value of Brands.” In ESOMAR, Excellence in International Research 2003, D. S. Fellows, ed. Amsterdam: ESOMAR, 2002.) This tool can be used for strategic decision-making purposes, such as assessing international expansion opportunities or prioritizing the purchase and/or sale of brands.

In October 2002, the U.S. Department of State under the direction of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and former advertising executive Charlotte Beers launched a first-ever public diplomacy campaign featuring television spots promoting the happy lives of American Muslims. The advertising campaign, known as the “Shared Values Initiative,” ran on a limited schedule throughout the Middle East and Asia through January 2003. This article attempts to assess the reactions and feelings that international viewers have toward the commercials and, to the extent possible, evaluate the effectiveness of the commercials on changing international audiences' attitudes toward the United States.

International students from various countries who were enrolled at Regents College in London, England in the summer of 2003 constituted the sample for this study. An experimental design, similar to those found in World War II propaganda literature, was employed to measure their attitudes toward the U.S. government, the American people, and their perception of how Muslims are treated in America before and after viewing the State Department commercials. The international students' reactions to the spots in the form of an advertising copy test are also reported.

Advertising effectiveness tests combining surveys and electronic tracking of online advertising are common, and the method is increasingly being utilized within more comprehensive, cross-media methodologies. The validity of these tests, however, has sometimes been called into question because of the short duration between online advertising exposure and survey taking. Using a unique database containing more than 1,600 online advertising campaigns, we find that there is a measurable but weak relationship between time since last exposure and branding effectiveness, indicating the shortness of duration does not have a substantial impact on the validity of these tests.

Today's pretesting is based on concepts of consumer behavior that were devised over a hundred years ago and which were largely discarded in the 1980s. What would it look like if we had known, and then applied what we know now, 25 years ago?

In a new purchasing environment (e.g., where a consumer moves to a new city), do consumers tend to keep buying the first brand that they try? If so, a behavioral primacy effect might be at work. Behavioral primacy exists when consumers tend to repeat-buy the first brand that they purchased more often than other brands that are bought in the same purchase environment. This report assumes the physical experience of buying and using the first brand is satisfactory, and that all competing brands are available in adjacent spaces (as in a supermarket or on a website). This article presents findings that demonstrate a behavioral primacy effect: purchasing a brand in the first week was found to have a significant impact on how often a brand was subsequently bought. Furthermore, initial experience in combination with marketing influence tactics (such as specific prices, coupons, and advertising) greatly increases the probability of purchase of a given brand. The findings support the focus by many marketers on attracting consumers to try their brand first. One rationale for this strategy is that in mundane product categories, if a brand experience is satisfactory, continuing to buy the first-brand bought helps to conserve cognitive effort for a consumer's more important concerns.Assistance in data analysis by Eric Goodwin, Boston College, is acknowledged with gratitude. Partial financial support from an ARC research grant is acknowledged (DP0344446).

As a direct marketing tool, electronic Short Message Service (SMS) is likely to surpass internet-based advertising before the end of 2006. This article profiles heavy and light consumer acceptors of SMS direct advertising texts and SMS direct marketing prompts to watch TV programs. The article includes empirical findings of practitioner campaign evaluations of SMS-TV direct marketing campaigns in U.K. and U.S. markets. The results support the view that younger consumers higher in social class are the most willing to accept SMS direct advertising text and respond favorably to SMS-TV integrated marketing communications. The article closes with a call for true experiments to validate consumer acceptance and use of SMS-TV interactive, commercial, communications via split-run testing.

What makes a brand loyalty program successful or cost-effective? Interviews of 41 managers of brand loyalty programs were conducted to establish the best practices for such programs. Following this, a study of 132 brand managers and a study of 643 consumers jointly show that brand managers may overestimate the importance of targeting heavy users (or frequent users) and may underestimate the effectiveness of inexpensive reward programs. In reality, low and moderate reward programs that target light users may generate higher incremental sales and may tend to be more profitable than is generally expected.

In verbal, one-way marketing communication, e.g., radio advertising, the only cues that the target customer has are voice related. Competitive and financial considerations dictate that advertisers use the most cost-effective means to accomplish their communication objectives. Using a two-step approach, this study examines, first, the effect of speech rate on young adult listener responses to verbal advertising. The second phase of the study seeks to identify significant differences when different methods of speech sampling (time- or pause compressed/expanded) are used to produce the faster/slower speech rates. Results indicate that faster speech rates affect the number of affective responses and the attitude toward the message while slower speech rates elicit more cognitive processing by young adult listeners. The use of pause only expansion to produce the slow speech rate accentuates the level of cognitive processing and attitude toward the message. Recognition of these effects allows the advertising strategist to further refine targeted message delivery.

Although managers have been aware of the significance of Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) for over a decade, they have been slow to leverage their ability to maximize their ROMI. The purpose of this article is to sketch a framework for optimizing a corporation's ROMI and to highlight the indispensability of ROMI to marketing management. The article suggests a framework to accelerate the adoption of ROMI, and a plan to carry out a pilot ROMI project. The benefits of ROMI are discussed, and barriers to ROMI listed. The authors conclude that ROMI management is a different kind of management.

In order to have a sense about where media planning is going, one must first have a contextual understanding of where it has been and at what place it is currently.

This study looks into different types of interactive functions, and the associative relationship between these interactive functions and website ranking. Six types of interactive functions are identified, and four of them are found to be significant in affecting website ranking. The four important types of interactive functions are Online Two-way Communication, Customization, Content Variety, and Interactive Job Search.

Consumer purchase decisions often require reliance on various information sources. Although prior research on information seeking has focused on the number of information sources used, the types of sources used and their impact on satisfaction have not been examined as thoroughly. The authors address this issue in the context of product-focused print media—magazines in particular—by exploring information source usage for the automobile purchase process. The impact of source usage on satisfaction with the purchase decision and with the product is examined as well. Implications for advertisers and brand managers are discussed in terms of media planning issues.

Over the last several decades, advertising effects on sales have been studied without appropriately taking into consideration competitors' advertising activities. As a result, advertisers often instinctively match competitors' spending proportionately when it is monitored. The weakness of such a competitive parity approach is that they implicitly assume zero-sum competition only. This study identifies a variety of competitive conditions under which better budgeting strategies can be formulated. Specifically, four types of competition are conceptualized based on how an advertiser and its competitors affect each other's sales according to level of media advertising spending. In addition, appropriate strategies for setting advertising budgets to deal with each situation are discussed. A mathematical method is developed to measure advertising effectiveness for both the advertiser and competitors on sales of a focal brand. The method computes current and carryover effects, identifies in which type of competition the advertiser is operating, and, accordingly, determines which budgeting strategy best suits the situation. In an empirical illustration, the method was applied to data collected monthly over eight years. The analyzed product was Scotch whisky sold in Thailand.

It has long been recognized that product or service benefits analysis may be useful in the development of marketing policy and new product/service designs (Banks, 1950). More recently, Haley (1968) suggested the use of product benefits as a basis for market segmentation. According to this view, individuals differ with regard to their evaluations of the want-satisfying attributes of products or services. For example, in the case of toothpastes some consumers may place high emphasis on a product's ability to whiten teeth while others attach greater importance to a toothpaste's decay preventativeness.

To the extent that brands are perceived to differ on valued attributes and the attributes themselves are valued differently, one can, in principle, develop market segments based on these differences. If one grants the usefulness of perceived product benefits as a basis for market segmentation (Frank, Massy, and Wind, 1972), there is still the measurement problem—how does one go about quantifying consumers’ utilities for various levels of valued product attributes?

Retail marketers' understanding of radio and television advertising campaigns' impact on retail store visits would be a major breakthrough in evaluating return on media investment. This article presents results from pilot research using Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPMSM, a mark of Arbitron Inc.)—a unique audience measurement system that enables radio, broadcast television and cable television usage, and retail store visits to be captured from a single-source national panel of consumers. The pilot research indicates that retail store visits correlated with media advertising exposure, illustrating the promise of a single-source research panel to measure ROI in terms of store visit behavior, an important driver of retailer financial results.

Advertising is a rich, multidimensional phenomenon that has been studied in several disciplines. This research has led to an emerging body of findings and some potential generalizations. Even then, misconceptions about advertising persist, and important aspects of the phenomenon have not been adequately researched. Despite advertising's apparent weakness it is essential for free markets.

Advanced Television will end the 100+ year master/slave relationship between the mass media and the audience. The media, the marketer, and the audience will all benefit from time shifting, addressability, interactivity, and cross platform access. However, Advanced Television will face significant challenges as innovations will require open attitudes and changes in business models. There are steps to be taken now to facilitate the introduction of the next generation of television and marketing communications.

This article builds a framework for a new approach to copy testing, based on a theoretical model of advertising that brings affective measures to the forefront. It points the way to a complete rethinking of some new and old tools for measuring the effects of advertising and makes specific suggestions for how copy testing should change.