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Ogilvy on Advertising — Chapter-15: 18 miracles of research

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15 18 MIRACLES OF RESEARCH Advertising people who ignore research are dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals. Before I became a copywriter, I was a researcher. I delivered the first paper on copy-testing in the history of British advertising. Later I ran Dr. Gallup’s Audience Research Institute in Princeton, predicting how many people would see movies before they were produced, measuring the ability of the stars to sell tickets at the box office, and so on. The best fun I ever had was in the early days of Ogilvy & Mather, when I was both Research Director and Creative Director. On Friday afternoons I wrote research reports to the Creative Director. On Monday mornings I changed hats, read my reports and decided what to do about them – if anything. In due course I was able to afford the services of Stanley Canter, a far better researcher. It took Stanley only ten days to get me out of his department. Like I always say, hire people who are better than you are. Here are 18 of the miracles research can perform for you:  

1. It can measure the reputation of your company among consumers, security analysts, government officials, newspaper editors, the academic community.  
2. Using mathematical models, research can estimate the sales of new products, and the advertising expenditures required to achieve maximum profits. The Hendry, Assessor, Sprinter, ESP and News models are sufficiently reliable to tell you whether your product warrants the expense of test marketing. (About 60 per cent of new products fail in test markets.)

1. Research can get consumer reactions to a new product when it is still in the conceptual state. After one of our clients had invested $600,000 in developing a line of food products for senior citizens whose digestions were deteriorating, our research found a notable lack of enthusiasm among the old parties concerned. When I reported this disappointing news to the client, I was afraid that, like most executives faced with inconvenient research, he would argue with our methodology. I underestimated him. ‘Dry hole’, said he, and left the meeting.  
2. Once a product is ready for market, research can tell you how consumers rate it compared with the products they are now buying. If they find your product inferior, send it back to your Research and Development people.  
3. Research can tell you what formulation, flavor, fragrance and color will appeal to most consumers.  
4. Research can find out which of several package designs will sell best. While you’re about it, find out if people can open your package. I shall never forget Cornelia Otis Skinner demonstrating to a big food company that she could not open their product without a pair of pliers.  
5. Research can help you decide the optimum positioning for your product.  
6. Research can define your target audience. Men or women. Young or old. Rich or poor. Education. Life style. Media habits.  
7. It can find out what factors are most important in the purchase decision, and what vocabulary consumers use when talking about your kind of product.  
8. Research can determine what ‘line extension’ is likely to sell best. After Dove carved out a profitable niche in the soap market, Lever Brothers fell to wondering what other products could be marketed under the same name. Research revealed that a liquid for washing dishes stood the best chance, and it was successfully introduced.  
9. Research can warn you when consumers show signs of finding an established product less desirable than it once was. Maybe they have noticed that you have been using cheaper ingredients; they usually do.

1. Research can save you time and money by ‘reading’ your competitor’s test markets – even his cost of goods and profit margin. All the information is there to get, if you know where to find it.  
2. Research can determine the most persuasive promise. ‘Promise, the large promise is the soul of an advertisement,’ said Samuel Johnson. When he auctioned off the contents of the Anchor Brewery he made the following promise: ‘We are not here to sell boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich and the dream of avarice.’ Dr. Johnson was right 200 years ago, and there is abundant evidence that he is still right today. Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatever. (That is the most important sentence in this book. Read it again.) Only last year Starch reported that advertisements with headlines that promise a benefit are read by an average of four times more people than advertisements that don’t. In my experience, the selection of the promise is the most valuable contribution that research can make to the advertising process. One method is to show the consumer a number of promises, telling him or her that each promise is for a new product. The consumer is asked to rate the promises for importance and uniqueness. Another technique, which I prefer, is not favored by researchers, perhaps because it is so simple and does not require their services. You write two advertisements for your product, each with a different promise in the headline. At the end of your copy, you offer a free sample of the product. You then run the advertisement in a newspaper or magazine, in such a way that half the circulation gets one headline, and the other half gets the other headline. The headline which draws the more applications for a sample wins the test. This technique, which is called split-run, was invented by Richard Stanton. Its merit is that it tests promises in the context of an advertisements, instead of the unreal context of an interview. But you can only test two headlines at a time. Try to find a promise which is not only persuasive, but also unique. For example, ‘makes a perfect cup of coffee every time’ may get the highest score on persuasion, but it is not unique. You may find that ‘gets you clean’ is the winning promise for a soap, but I doubt if it is sufficiently unique to make the cash register ring.

Sometimes you will find that the promise which wins your test is already being used by one of your competitors. Poor you.   14. Research can tell you which of several premiums will work best. When 35 different premiums were tested by Shell, steak knives won. Different designs of steak knives were then tested. When I suggested that packets of shells from Sanibel Island should be offered to motorists who used Shell credit cards, I was coldly informed that shells had been tested and had received a very low score. In France, they were used as the premium without being tested, and flopped.   15. Research can tell you whether your advertising communicates what you want it to communicate. Keep in mind E. B. White’s warning, ‘When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.’   16. Research can tell you which of several television commercials will sell the most. What is the best technique for pre-testing television commercials? This is the most controversial issue in the advertising business, but there is common agreement among researchers that testing for recall is for the birds. Yet, for reasons which escape me, most advertisers still insist on using it. It has four shortcomings:   • Nobody has been able to demonstrate a relationship between recall and sales. • Some commercials which score about average on recall, score below average on their ability to change the viewer’s brand preference. Celebrity commercials, for example, usually score above average on recall and below average on changing brand preference. • It is too easy for the copywriter to cheat. ‘When I want a high recall score,’ says my partner David Scott, ‘all I have to do is to show a gorilla in a jock strap.’ • It is open to question whether recall tests even measure recall. I believe they measure the viewer’s ability to articulate what he or she recalls, which is a very different thing.

For all these reasons, I prefer testing methods which measure your commercial’s ability to change brand preferences. Research can measure the wear-out of your advertising. For five years, the theme of Shell’s commercials was mileage, and tracking studies recorded increasingly favorable attitudes to the product. When attitudes finally stopped improving, the advertising was changed from demonstrations of mileage to consumer testimonials, and the upward trend was resumed.   17. Research can tell you how many people read your advertisements, and how many remember them. What do grown-ups read in newspapers? The comic strips? The editorials? The weather? The stock market? The sports pages? The main news items? The columnists? Until Gallup came along, editors hadn’t the faintest idea who read what. Gallup invented a method of measuring readership. He interviewed representative samples of readers, took them through the newspaper and had them point to the things they had read. It came as a surprise to editors when he reported that more people read the comics than their editorials, and that captions under photographs were read by more people than the articles. When he repeated the same research in Britain, he got the same results. During World War II my brother Francis, then a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force, slept in the underground bunker which was the center of the high command. He told me that when the Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals came into breakfast, they looked at the comic strips in the Daily Mirror before they read the headlines in The Times. When Raymond Rubicam got wind of Gallup’s research, he persuaded him to join Young & Rubicam and apply the same method to measuring the readership of advertisements. At about the same time, Daniel Starch started syndicating readership reports to agencies and advertisers, and his successors still do so. The day I spent watching a Starch interviewer at work in the field convinced me that the procedure is reasonably valid.   18. Research can settle arguments. When Lord Geddes became Chairman of British Travel, he argued that we should feature trout fishing in advertisements – until I pulled out of a chart showing that fishing interested American tourists less than all the 49 other subjects we had tested. Armed with this kind of information, it is difficult not to defeat competitors who fly blind. But there are two vital questions that research

cannot answer:   • Which campaign will make the biggest contribution to your brand over a period of years? Here you still have to rely on judgment. • What price should you charge for your product? This is one of the most important questions which confront marketers, but, as far as I know, research cannot answer it.   Given sufficient training, any intelligent person can learn to conduct surveys, but getting people to use the results requires salesmanship of high order. When I did research for the motion picture industry, I had my reports set in type and printed. I found that the Hollywood producers were less likely to argue with printed documents than typewritten memos. SIZE OF SAMPLE Surveys can produce reliable results with amazingly small samples. If you want to know whether the word ‘obsolete’ is understood by housewives, you don’t need an answer which will be statistically reliable within two percentage points. Twenty housewives will suffice. When, however, you are looking for trends over time, you had better use larger samples to be sure that any changes are statistically significant. You must also hold the composition of your sample and the wording of your questions rigidly constant. PITFALLS OF RESEARCH Some interviewers find it more comfortable to answer questionnaires themselves than to accost strangers. An enterprising London pub used to cater to them by setting aside a private room where they could drink beer while filling out questionnaires. Respondents do not always tell the truth to interviewers. I used to start my questionnaires by asking, ‘Which would you rather hear on the radio tonight – Jack Benny or a Shakespeare play?’ If the respondent said Shakespeare, I knew he was a liar and broke off the interview. When Gone With the Wind was a runaway best seller, we asked a cross-section of the adult population whether they had read it. The number of yes replies was obviously inflated; people did not want to admit that they hadn’t read it. The

following week we put the question differently: ‘Do you plan to read Gone With the Wind?’ It was easy for those who hadn’t read it to answer yes, they planned to read it, while those who had already read it said so. This produced a credible result. Waiting for a train in Pennsylvania station one evening, I was accosted by an interviewer and asked questions which I had written two days before. They were impossible to answer. I went back to my office and canceled the survey. A food manufacturer had to decide whether to sell his product in cans or glass jars. He guessed that some housewives would vote for glass because they thought glass sounded more prestigious, so he gave out samples of his product in glass and other samples in cans. Two weeks later he called back and asked the housewives which samples tasted better. A large majority declared that the product in the jars tasted better than the same product in the cans. Without knowing it, they were voting for glass. In a study of the causes of inflation, the French Government cut thousands of cheeses in half and put them on sale. One half were marked 37 centimes, the other 56 centimes. The higher-priced cheese sold faster. Consumers judge the quality of product by its price. RESEARCH AMONG CHILDREN If you think that advertising to children is satanic, skip the next two pages. If, on the other hand, you earn your living making toys or breakfast cereals, you may be interested to learn how research can make your advertising produce more sales. Children understand only the simplest questions, and cannot easily articulate their replies. They also tend to say what they think you want them to say. Here are three procedures which work reasonably well: Group dynamics. You show your commercial to a group of children and then get them to play games, like talking to a friend on a play telephone about your commercial. Or you get them to imitate the characters in the commercial. This procedure reveals misunderstandings and negative reactions. Communication discrepancy. This procedure is for somewhat older children. You show them your commercial and ask them what it told them about the product, and what they liked about it. Then you show them the

product itself and ask what they like about it. By comparing what they said about the commercial and what they say about the product itself, you find out whether your commercial does your product justice. If it doesn’t, you can usually fix it. Suppose you show a doll commercial. Only 20 per cent of the children say they like the fact that the doll can walk. But when they see the doll itself, 60 per cent say they like this. Obviously, the commercial has not done justice to the doll. If, on the other hand, you find that your commercial raises hopes which are disappointed when the children see the doll, I have little doubt that, being an honest person, you will modify the commercial. Prize pad test. You give children a pad on which four toys are illustrated, including the one you are advertising, and ask them to circle the toy they would like you to give them. Then, after showing them your commercial, you say that some of the children forgot to put their names on the pad, which is probably true. You hand out new pads and again ask them to circle the toy they want. By comparing the votes, you get a measurement of your commercial’s persuasion. After doing this with several toys and several commercials, you can relate your score to the norm. Gentle reader and fellow parent, if you think it unseemly for researchers to enroll children as guinea-pigs, it will comfort you to know that they are now protected from us admen by ferocious regulations. For example, we are no longer allowed to tell children to importune their mothers to buy our products. Other regulations in force in the United States include these:   • ‘Appeals shall not be used which directly or by implication contend that if children have a product they are better than their peers, or lacking it, will not be accepted by their peers.’ • ‘Material shall not be used which can reasonably be expected to frighten children or provoke anxiety, nor shall material be used which contains a portrayal of or appeal to violent, dangerous or otherwise anti-social behavior.’ • ‘Advertisements shall not include any dramatizations of any product in a realistic war atmosphere.’ • ‘Advertisements shall include audio and video disclosure when items such as batteries needed to operate a product as demonstrated in the advertising are

not included.’ • ‘When a toy is presented in the context of a play environment, the setting and situation shall be that which a child is reasonably capable of reproducing.’ • ‘Advertising shall not employ costumes and props which are not available with the toy as sold, or are not reasonably accessible to the child without additional cost.’ • ‘Each commercial for breakfast-type products shall include at least one audio reference to and one video depiction of the role of the product within the framework of a balanced regimen.’   Just try writing a commercial which obeys 34 regulations like these. WHERE I COME OUT Few copywriters share my appetite for research. The late and great Bill Bernbach, among many others, thought that it inhibited creativity. My experience has been the opposite. Research has often led me to good ideas, such as the eyepatch in the Hathaway campaign. I have seen ideas so wild that nobody in his senses would dare to use them – until research found that they worked. When I had the idea of writing headlines for French tourism in French, my partners told me I was nuts – until research revealed that French headlines were more effective than English headlines. Research has also saved me from making some horrendous mistakes. I admit that research is often misused by agencies and their clients. They have a way of using it to prove they are right. They use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost – not for illumination but for support. On the whole, however, research can be of incalculable help in producing more effective advertising.

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RBAGAN,Ronald October1941-January1942 This chart shows the percentage of ticket-buyers in each group who say that the nameof this player on the front of theaterwould make other factors which influence the value of this player. MALES 10 FEMALES TOTAL 10 Boys 12-17 17 Men 18-30 Men Girls 12-17 20 Women 18-30 Women 31 up Prosperous Over860perweek Upper Middle $35to$60perweek

This chart from the author’s Continuing Audit of Marquee Values analysed Ronald Reagan’s popularity at the height of his career as a movie star. The author (left) and George Gallup (right).

Outside George Gallup’s office in Princeton, long ago, the author asks a moviegoer if she would pay money to see Abe Lincoln in Illinois. She said she would, but she was kidding herself.