The Effectiveness of Advertising: a Literature Review

The effectiveness of advertising: a literature review

Elisabetta Corvi
Associate Professor of Economics and Business Management
University of Brescia [e-mail] Michelle Bonera (corresponding author)
Assistant Professor of Economics and Business Management
University of Brescia
[phone] [e-mail] Abstract

The aim of the paper is to propose a simple approach to monitor and control the encoding phase, too often neglected by the doctrine and operators in the communication process. The paper is discusses a possible methodology to investigate the degree of coincidence / discordance between what is conveyed through the advertising and what is actually understood by some consumers. The object of investigation is the verbal text of the spot in order to verify the level of understanding of the message and, if necessary, to find the reasons of a wrong perceived meaning.

Introduction
Advertising effectiveness can be defined as the extent to which advertising generates a certain desired effect. Measuring the effects of advertising is very important, given the amount of investments needed for advertising. While it is not possible to obtain a global measure of the advertising effectiveness, we should seek to develop and apply methods and measures for a partial verification of results. Regarding the difficulty of measuring the overall effectiveness, we believe that it is due essentially to the following considerations:

• advertising interacts with other business variables (behavior, marketing policies, financial decisions etc.) and environmental variables (competition, economic conjuncture etc.), hardly isolable;
• the effects of advertising are varied and not always translatable into quantitative terms;
• advertising causes long-term effects, not always, therefore, the results occur in the same period in which are the costs.

In literature and practice the evaluation of advertising effectiveness has used

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