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The key advantage to BRC’s
approach is that it is based on people’s ability to recognize things they have
seen before, something they can do easily and with great accuracy. To
track the impact of past advertising we start by showing a variety of
advertising to respondents and ask which they remember seeing before. In
pretesting advertising we show the advertising imbedded in program material or a
mocked up magazine, wait several days, and do the same thing. Why?
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Intrusiveness: The greatest danger any
advertising ever faces is being ignored. You need the best possible measure of
intrusiveness to see if the person noticed the advertising - and the process had
a chance to get started. Recognition is the best way to determine
attention getting value, because it is:
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Accurate - Recognition
capitalizes on one of the great strengths of the human mind. This is
documented by psychologists’ photograph sorting experiments, where people
are given a stack of several hundred photos to look at. Then several hundred
additional photos are mixed in and the respondent is asked to sort out the
ones they saw the first time. People of normal intelligence can routinely
identify the ones they saw before with 95-98% accuracy. This is vastly
different than the alternative: recall. A little introspection usually shows
how poor the mind is in recalling things like names, phone numbers - and
commercials.
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Sensitive - Recognition scores
are more likely to show statistically significant differences because they
spread out over a wider range. They don't bunch up at the low end of the
range like recall scores.
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Reliable - Recognition provides
high test-retest reliability. You get the same results every time.
Recognition persists for a long time, unlike recall which decays rapidly.
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Sturdy - Recognition tests don't
break down in the field. They don’t produce wildly different results with
different interviewers and coders, and with different methods of showing the
advertising.
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Complete - Recognition
identifies two to three times as many of the people who have actually been
exposed to an advertisement as a comparable test based on recall.
An accurate segregation of the
sample into those who noticed the advertising and those who didn't is critical
for all the remaining steps in testing the impact of advertising. The
first is measuring the ability of the ad or commercial to get the name across,
and that is discussed on the Who is it for
page.
Both attention getting value and the
ability to get the name across are well measured in recognition-based testing.
They are among the most difficult characteristics to get a satisfying measure of
when other techniques are used.
The need to show things eliminates the use
of telephone surveys for this type of research. Telephone surveys ask people if
they recall any advertising. Two major industry-wide studies have shown recall
has little or no relationship to the impact of advertising. It identifies too
small a segment of the people who have actually been reached and affected by
advertising. It is not accurate because it relies on one of the weakest parts of
the mind, our ability to recall things from memory. Verbal descriptions in a
phone survey are only a partial solution. In identifying people who have
actually been reached by advertising, it barely accounts for half as many as
visual recognition. It is also less accurate. A greater number will claim to
have seen advertising that has never run.
References
on Recall vs. Recognition
Studies that show
recall is the wrong way
Studies that show recognition is the
right way
Surendra N. Singh, Michel L..Rothschild, Gilbert
A. Churchill, “Recognition vs.
Recall as
Measures of Television Commercial
Forgetting,” Journal of Marketing Research 25, February 1988
Herbert E. Krugman, “Low Recall, High
Recognition of Ads,” Journal of Advertising Research,
March 1986
Wolfgang
Schaefer, “Recognition Reconsidered,” Marketing & Research Today (ESOMAR), May 1995
Hubert A.. Zielske, “Does Day-After-Recall
Penalize ‘Feeling’ Ads?” Journal of Advertising
Research 22, February/March 1982
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