Advertising Research

The importance of advertising research depends really on your advertising campaign and the type of your company and other demographic factors. If you are a small company, sucn as a restaurant or local grocer, there is a good chance that advertising research is not for you. You will already have a finger on the local pulse, and be able to exploit community recognition to advance your business, hopefully, and advertising research can be pricey for the limited budget of the small businessman or small business woman.

If you are conducting a national campaign, however, advertising research might be just the thing to ensure the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. The bottom line is that it is impossible to know for sure how people are going to react to an advertisement on a nationwide scale, but advertising research can make it much more likely to succeed. And, while for a small business running only a few ads at a relatively low price, and catering to a small, local market, advertising research makes little sense, a large corporation launching a huge and expensive nationwide marketing campaign has good cause to hire advertising researchers.

Advertising research comes in almost as many different flavors as advertising itself. advertising researchers use focus groups, surveys, perceptual and psychological tests, and sensory data – the advertising research lab is practically a science facility. Basically, the idea is always the same. To predict how people in general will respond to an advertisement through monitoring a small sample of people and seeing how they feel about different advertisements. These people are often paid in either a small amount of monetary compensation, or some sample of the advertised product to participate. They are shown commercials and asked to fill out surveys about how those commercials made them feel. They are then divided into groups and led through a series of questions to analyze more deeply their reactions to the advertisements.

Sometimes their vital signs are actually monitored for reactions to advertisements, although not always as many people find this awkward and uncomfortable. These monitors can detect changes in heart rate, brainwave rate, and galvanic skin response or gsr, which indicate feelings of excitement, lethargy, or fear or desire. They are great, especially for visual advertisements, because they can pinpoint directly what part of a commercial excites the viewer's interest, and which part does nothing for them. There isn't any more high tech way for a business to improve sales than advertising research.