The customer who has the choice among
various makes and brands in the store may not have any idea how far
one is superior to another, but the mere fact that one among them
bears a name which has repeatedly approached his consciousness before
through advertisements is sufficient to arouse a certain warm feeling
of acquaintance, and by a transposition of feeling this pleasurable
tone accentuates the attractiveness of that make and leads to its
selection. This indirect help through the memory-value is economically
no less important than the direct service.
In order to produce a strong effect on memory the advertisement must
be easily apprehensible. Psychological laboratory experiments with
exact time-measurement of the grasping of various advertisements of
the same size for the same article, but in different formulations,
demonstrated clearly how much easier or harder the apprehension became
through relatively small changes. No mistake in the construction of
the advertisement causes so much waste as a grouping which makes the
quick apperception difficult. The color, the type, the choice of
words, every element, allows an experimental analysis, especially by
means of time-measurement. If we determine in thousandths of a second
the time needed to recognize the characteristic content of an
advertisement, we may discriminate differences which would escape the
naive judgment, and yet which in practical life are of considerable
consequence, as the effect of a deficiency is multiplied by the number
of readers.
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