Planned or Impulse Purchases? How to Create Effective Infomercials

Conventional wisdom suggests that most purchases made from infomercials - 30-minute direct-response television advertisements - are made on impulse.

Planned or Impulse Purchases? How to Create Effective lnfomercials

Tom Agee andBrett A. S. MartinUniversity of Auckland

Infomercials represent a form of advertising of considerable commercial significance. In 1996, advertisers were reported to have spent $800 million on infomercial time (Lockard, 1997), with infomercials more recently generating global sales of $75billion (Direct Marketing, 1999). Furthermore, a number of large companies are using or planning to use infomercials, including Cadillac, Philips, Ericsson, and Volvo (Guilford, 1999; Krol, 1998; Halliday, 1999; Wasserman, 1999).

Yet despite the commercial importance of this form of advertising, there is little...

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