Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA20824 (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 14:14:03 +0100 Message-ID: <39191AF5.D990B6ED@mediaone.net> Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 09:16:54 +0100 From: Chuck Palson <cpalson@mediaone.net> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: a memetic experiment- an eIe opener References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D31CEB165@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Vincent Campbell wrote:
> 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.
As I said in my other reply, you don't have to know how to say it to remember it
enough to buy the product. So, yes, you are right. The interesting thing that
this illustrates is how modularized the brain is. Pinker hypothesizes that it is
modularized to prevent reducency - like procedures in a computer program that
many other mudules can use. I find it quite fascinating how psycholinguistics
can infer the different modules from the structure of speech.
>
>
> 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.
Yes - my point was that there is a lot of flim flam in advertising precisely
because no one could do the kind of research necessary to prove cause and effect
- it would be too expensive.
> Even basic factors, such
> as product utility, are ignored.
>
Not really. That's only true in a mature market where only brand name
differentiates. But the vast majority of products are not in mature markets. You
only think so because the mature products are almost by definition the most
visible.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
===============================================================
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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