Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id NAA20147 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 10 May 2000 13:18:47 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D31CEB165@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: a memetic experiment- an eIe opener Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 13:16:51 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Actually Chuck, such research makes no sense.
If people don't remember or mis-remember advertising then how did it make
them buy the product? The point I was making is about simple ideas of
causality. Advertising researchers are only interested in whether or not
their specific adverts work on specific people, and they fundamentally and
persistently ignore context. If they say that people don't remember or
mis-remember advertising messages but buy the product anyway, they still
assume it's because of the advertising. Even the statistical studies
demonstrate time and time again factors other than exposure to advertising
impacts on what products people buy.
Let me give an example for a different context (for which there is also a
lot of research) of politics. Let's say you follow a group of people
exposed only to the campaign advertising (I'll assume a US system of paid
advertising), and one section of that group when asked misremember what
Bush and Gore said, and stand for, and that another section of the group
can't remember what either of them said (quite typical I'd guess from the
personalities of the current candidates), and then they all go out and vote.
Is anybody really going to suggest that someone who can't remember who Gore
is, or what his ads said, votes for Gore because of his ads? It doesn't
make sense.
The problem for companies employing advertisers, marketing and PR
consultants is that somebody somewhere buys the product (or votes for the
party), and those people can be deemd to have been successfully persuaded by
the campaign just because they bought the product. Even basic factors, such
as product utility, are ignored.
A classic example would be the cheese developed in the 1980s in the UK
called 'Lymeswold'. Everything about this new product was carefully
planned, and was marketed and advertised expertly. It got massive media
coverage too, through excellent PR, but nobody liked when it went on sale
and the brand bombed.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Chuck Palson
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Tuesday, May 9, 2000 2:49 pm
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: a memetic experiment- an eIe opener
>
>
>
> Vincent Campbell wrote:
>
> > With respect, this idea ignores 75 or more years of media studies that
> have
> > been trying to identify the pecularities of media effects.
> >
> > I believe memetics may offer a perspective on this, but there's no way
> in
> > which your proposal would work because the uptake of memes is
> > context-sensitive, both in the sense of the environment in which a meme
> > emerges, and second in terms of the people who are exposed to the meme.
> > This is exactly why most theories of advertising and marketing etc. are
> so
> > flawed because they assume that if you construct a message with
> > characteristic 'a' and disseminate it to audience member 'b' you will
> get
> > the desired effect 'c'. But it obviously doesn't work like that. There
> is
> > little evidence that there is something inherent in any media text which
> > makes it more or less likely to succeed in general terms, mainly because
> the
> > audience is not an amorphous mass of automatons, but people with both
> > overlapping and contradictory attitudes, knowledge, etc. etc.
> >
> > Vincent
> >
>
> I heartily agree. I want to add something that all of you might find very
> interesting in regards to the above. The media industry took several to
> complete
> a study that studied the effect of advertising by actually following
> people
> around after they had been exposed to real advertising in their real
> lives.
> Here's what they found: there is very little correlation between what
> people say
> they remember of products with what they actually do in regards to that
> product. In other words, while they may not be able to SAY that they
> remember
> product X, they will nevertheless be more prone to buy that product if
> they have
> seen the advertising.
>
> That, of course, is how all research on the effect of advertising should
> be
> done, but it's too expensive. So what do they do instead? They still quote
> figures on how many people remember!
>
> That's a real story that indicates just how hard it is to study the
> effects of
> media. The advertising industry may say they study such effects, but it's
> really
> flim flam.
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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