No One Knows Quite How Advertising Works

From Ad Age, this book sounds interesting:

"New Book Reports 37% of All Advertising is Wasted
Five-Year Research Project Tracked $1 Billion in Spending by 36 Major Marketers"

"The bold proclamations in "What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds," to be released next month by Kaplan Publishing, are the result of five years of research on campaigns from 36 of the nation's top advertisers. The book, penned by Rex Briggs, a veteran market researcher and founder of the firm Marketing Evolution, and Greg Stuart, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, may well be the most important advertising research since the "How Advertising Works" study of the early 1990s."

"...They reveal how frequently marketers disregard research when it doesn't jibe with their own opinions -- or seek out research that does."

"Ad agencies, the target of nearly nonstop flagellation both self-inflicted and otherwise in the past decade, may find some solace in the book. It pins much of the blame for marketing's woes on marketers and their failure to even define success for campaigns at the outset -- much less measure it properly on the back end. Of the 36 marketers the authors researched, only two -- P&G and Cingular -- had a clear definition of success for each marketing effort at the outset, Mr. Briggs said in an interview."

Market research is a tool to aid the process of marketing. I believe just about everything I do is research, from chatting to friends, to sitting on the tube or bus listening and looking, to shopping and attending cultural events. Focus groups are just about the least useful research tool, but they can yield extraordinary bits of enlightenment.