Advertising and communications testing

Case Study

Our client, a global personal care company, wanted to establish the most engaging advertising route for its market leading shampoo brand.  Traditionally, their advertising features a product demonstration, but a new advertising route was developed which focused much more on the emotional benefits that the product could give. The question was: to include the product demo in this new route or not?

We undertook a 2 cell test plus a control cell – one sample saw the new ad without product demonstration, a second saw a version with the demo included, whilst a 3rd cell – the control group- saw no advertising.  We recommended this approach so that we could compare the effects of exposure to the advertising on feelings towards the brand with the pre-existing feelings towards the brand.

It was clear that both versions of the new commercial produced a significant uplift in purchase intent vs. the control cell. What was less clear however - and only revealed by our Metaphorix® measures - was that the version with the product demo produced higher levels of engagement with the brand than the purely emotional route.

We concluded that, while, women enjoyed both the narrative and creative approach of the advertising, they also wanted some product information to ‘seal the deal’ and underscore their (already strong) emotional attachment to the brand.  The combination of emotion plus product demonstration was therefore recommended and adopted.

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