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...