Our approach is founded on the concept that advertising can evoke a variety of responses from the target audience.  Most importantly it can:

• Change behavior (e.g., convert you to a new brand or persuade a person to try a new product)
• Educate or remind a consumer (e.g., communicate availability or remind you of a key brand promise)
• Evoke an emotional response (e.g., create a positive association for the brand, improve brand affinity, etc.)
• Improve brand recognition and keep the brand top-of-mind versus its competitors (e.g., stand-out from other ads, remind people of the brand)

This leads us to believe that we need to have measures of ad-effectiveness that are similarly multi-dimensional. Our four key measures are:

• Empathy (Do they like it? Does it improve brand affinity? Is it personally relevant?)
• Persuasion (improvement or reinforcement of brand disposition; effect on purchase intent and interest in the brand)
• Impact (stand-out, differentiation and involvement)
• Communication (recall of main message, comprehension, strength of impression of key messages)  
   

Advertising Tracking

The study design and analysis centers around the array of powerful diagnostic tools utilized in our proprietary approach to continuous tracking.

Our experience has been honed with considerable analysis of previous campaigns in a variety of market sectors—successful campaigns and campaigns that are flawed. By comparing the good campaigns with the less-successful campaigns, we have arrived at views of how to look at advertising in a certain way.

Frost & Sullivan seeks to answer these fundamental questions:

• Has my advertising worked?
• How well has it worked? (better or worse than competition)
• Can it be further improved? How?

These are simple questions and are answerable by utilizing our approach. In research terms we could express these objectives as:

• To evaluate the efficiency of media expenditure in being noticed and linked to the brand
• To track the image of the brands relative to competitors; to evaluate perceptions of strengths and weaknesses of the brand
• Through the use of the research data, give recommendations on how to improve the performance of the advertising and media expenditure