Point of view: Sales don’t equal effectiveness

This article discusses the difficulties in measuring advertising effectiveness in terms of sales, as the impact of an ad is unlikely to be visible in short term sales figure changes.

Point of view: Sales don't equal effectiveness

Byron SharpEhrenberg-Bass Institute

The purpose of advertising is largely to encourage more consumers to buy your brand more often. Some debate still lingers concerning how this occurs, e.g. attitude shift vs mental availability, but it is uncontroversial that exposure to a brand's advertising should increase the propensity to buy that brand -that's what an advertiser hopes to achieve for their spend.

Yet, this is not what is measured, hardly ever. A bit of this increase in propensity to buy the brand shows up in a change in this week's sales figures. But...

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