Mind doctors throw light on what makes consumers buy
Manfred Mareck
Psychologist and marketing guru Gerald Zaltman once said existing methods don't go far enough to help advertisers move closer to understanding their customers. Quite right, and for too long marketing and brand managers have echoed John Wanamaker et al in never being certain which half of their advertising budget was being 'wasted'.
Most methods of measuring the impact of marketing programmes relied on respondents' explicit memory and the assumption that advertising messages work rationally, according to the post-war AIDA model and its many variations.
In the mid-1970s,...