Tool Box
Issue No. 31 - October/November 2006
How effective are different media?
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
It is claimed to be the first of its kind in the world in that it used the views and reactions of both customers or consumers and marketers; around 1600 people nationwide, in total. It assessed the media channels for both B2C and B2B advertising and other marketing communication purposes like sending out and getting bills paid.
One part of the study involved finding out how people assessed various media on criteria like: reliability, trustworthiness, convenience and entertainment. Both the receivers of media and the senders, that is marketing people, were asked to do this assessment and differences were found.
For instance, the senders tended to think that ‘messages’ in a medium should be informative and that newspapers were good for this, whereas consumers wanted their media to be enjoyable, entertaining and reliable and did not see the press as any better at these than any other media.
Another part of the study involved two hypothetical sales propositions that could plausibly be promoted through any of the 11 media channels: one was a super fund and the other a wide-screen, high definition plasma TV. Various measures were taken of the responses to the offers in the various media, including intention-to-buy.
The Findings
There are many findings given in the study, too may to detail here. One of the authors of the Study will give a Presentation on it in Adelaide on 26 October2, hosted by Australia Post.
Interesting and possibly controversial findings are:
•Advertisers seem to have different beliefs about what consumers or business clients are looking for in the use of media ( for example, ‘difficult to ignore’) when used to carry advertising; because of this the effectiveness of the advertising can be 30% less than it should be for consumers and 35% less for business clients.
•In terms of the possible use of ‘new’ media, senders of invoices who consider email for this thi...
