Communicating Brands in Television Advertising

摘要

An important goal of advertising is to build strong brands, for they in turn can positively affect product sales (Keller 2007). Thus, it is unsurprising that Unilever spent $8.3 billion on advertising in 2014, while its main competitor P&G invested almost $9.0 billion (AdAge 2015; P&G 2015). Yet, the various research efforts undertaken to quantify the effects of advertising on brand sales (e.g., Assmus, Farley, and Lehmann 1984; Sethuraman, Tellis, and Briesch 2011) suggest that the average sales effect of advertising is relatively low. Only half of all advertising exerts an effect that is significantly different from zero (Lodish et al. 1995). Scholars thus have argued that advertising often "does not brand well" (Keller 2007, p. 63), noting that most advertisements simply fail to establish strong brand links. A reason could be that marketers do not know how to communicate their brand within an advertising, which would likely produce a weak relationship between advertising and sales (Bass et al. 2007). So how should marketers communicate their brands in advertising, to build strong brands and thereby generate sales?