Advertising Market Research
What can Branding Market Research Do for My Business?
- Ensure that your research portfolio (and medium) is appropriate for your target audience?
- Ensure that your advertising agency, or internal specialist, understand the core needs of your target audience.
- Is the copywriting in your ads communicating in an effective way to your target audience
- Ensure that the graphics is eye-catching enough to draw the target audience in to take a look at your
- Is your advertising plan the best use of your money? How does your advertising spend match with your organization's strategic objectives.
- What will the frequency of your current ad plan be, and how will it be leveraged in the future?
- How prominent of a role will your 'call to action' play in your advertising v. the development of the brand or education of your product's benefits? Is that balanced with the awareness level of the target audience?
- How many advertising mediums have been considered and what where the reasons for the final selection(s) of the accepted mediums.
- Will your current advertising plan increase your market share with the existing target customer or is it aimed at expanding your reach into other customer segments? If so, which particular additional customer segment are you targeting and what is your expected ROI at your estimated product uptake rates?
- What concerns do you have about the media kits of the selected advertising mediums? What percentage of your advertising dollars are likely to be wasted with those mediums on non-target customer segments?
- Does the creative message lend itself well to the chosen media? Could the ad be more effective if put through another media - and does that media match the target customer as well as the initial media?
What is Advertising Market Research?
Advertising research - is a specialized form of marketing research conducted to understand the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. The choice of which medium is most effective for a particular target customer continues to grow more challenging as the number of options continues to grow, and certain types of customers develop unique ways to keep up on favorite television shows, world news and music. The job an advertiser is much more complicated today than it was even just a few years ago, and advertising research can help to confirm the wisdom of selecting one medium over another, and even one campaign over another campaign.
Many large companies develop or leverage some form of advertising effectiveness index and measure all tested advertising campaigns against that index in order to help compare campaigns one against another, and in some cases to help determine which campaigns justify the expenditure of launching them into the market.
How Does Branding Market Research Work?
Advertising has been forced to cover a very broad range of mediums and advertising methods and likewise the number of market research options have expanded greatly and are to numerous to do justice to each of them in this brief article. However we can say that there are both qualitative and quantitative advertising market research methods. In general, most advertising research projects have a number of common elements:
- They're interested in understanding how clear the association is, in the target customer's mind, between the advertisement and the represented brand
- They are interested in the retention rate of a commercial - or the number of times that it needs to be seen or heard before it "sticks" - with the target customer.
- Does the advertising motivate the target customer to seek more information about the product, or to want to purchase the product outright?
- How is the brand affected in the target customer's mind by the advertising? Is the effect fleeting or lasting?
- What are the perceptions of the brand/product that remain with the target customer after the details of the ad have been long forgotten.
Advertising research is a very complicated task and growing more complicated with the new media options that are being developed every day (Satellite - commercial free Radio, Tivo, Podcasting, DVDs, home media centers and the decline of printed material). Advertising can be a very expensive venture and it always pays to think through the linkages of the selected media and the creative essence of the ad, and in some cases it also pays to perform some type of market research before launching an advertising campaign.
