Predicting what? The strengths and limitations of a test of persuasive advertising principles

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss Armstrong et al. ’s (2016) finding that ads that more closely follow evidence-based persuasion principles also achieve higher day-after-recall. Design/methodology/approach – The author evaluates the importance of Armstrong et al. ’s result and considers the criticisms that their work only examines some aspects of persuasion and that their dependent variable is known to have a low correlation with sales. Findings – Armstrong et al. ’s result provides a major advance in the knowledge of persuasive advertising. While they do not examine all aspects of persuasion, the scope of their tests is still very extensive. Day-after-recall is also arguably a better measure of advertising effectiveness than sales impact, due to the difficulty of identifying small sales changes among the random fluctuations that constantly occur in most markets and given the known processes by which consumer memory operates. Originality/value – By synthesising prior work on advertising and consumer memory, the author provides a simple model of how advertising interacts with memory. This model explains why ad recall ought to be poorly correlated with sales, and highlights the need for Armstrong et al. ’s result to be followed by further research into how contextual cues at the point of purchase affect memory retrieval and brand choice.