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The use of presently available advertising testing methods has encouraged an oversimplified view of the ways in which advertising works. Many of these methods suggest that X% of an advertising audience noted an ad while Y% did not; that X% understood it while Y% did not; or that X% "believed" it while Y% did not.
Thus a single ad's performance is often seen as a series of "jumps" over a number of successive hurdles, with belief of the ad being the last of these.
Although such assumptions may be true in general, they may be dangerously misleading in their particulars. Research in recent years has clearly demonstrated that noting, understanding, and believing are not either-or, or go/no-go occurrences.
More important, it is now apparent that no ad is likely to be completely "believable" when its purpose is to change people's minds. Moreover, an ad need not be believed completely to be effective.
These views are based on three years of background research, a continuing program of communication research conducted by the Leo Burnett Co., and from a survey of hundreds of books and articles concerning all phases of persuasive communication.
BELIEVABLE TO WHOM?
Advertising believability represents the net effect of advertising upon the mind of the reader, listener, or viewer. Few advertisers, ad researchers, or psychologists would disagree with the statement that an ad is "believed" when it leaves the consumer with that attitude, belief, or intention toward the product which the advertiser intended that he or she should have after exposure to the ad.
However, believability is not an inherent property of the ad itself. It is not a mystic something that some ads have and others do not. Believability depends on the interaction of each ad with the consumer's attitudes and memories accumulated from prior experience.
Each person's predispositions to note, understand, and accept or reject certain messages is learned. Different people have different expectations about the trustworthiness of various kinds of advertising; they have developed different kinds of knowledge and different types of feelings about the products or brands being advertised. This means that an ad completely believable to one person may not be at all believable to another.
In other words, we must specify "believable to whom" when we consider...