Jacob Hornik, "Temporal Instability as a Moderating Factor on Advertising Effectiveness." Journal of Business Research, 18 (March, 1989), 89 106.
One of the basic problems of advertisers is that they must create a product which will impress a brand name on a potential buyer in such a way that it will be recalled when usually some time later that buyer is actually in a store and ready to make a purchase. In this study, author Hornik examines the effects of two types of ad, "emotional appeal" and "rational appeal," viewed at three times of day, morning, midday, and late afternoon, on both short term and long term brand recall. The study was carried out on college psychology students who viewed sample ads classified into emotional or rational by advertising executives.
What he found is that short term recall is (unsurprisingly) always better than long term recall, and, of greater interest, that delayed recall of ads in general tends to rise in the course of the day a pattern particularly noticeable in the case of ads having a "rational" appeal.
This finding tends, it is worth noting, to bear out the validity of "prime time" as a key time period for TV ads, even apart from the larger audience. Hornik's study is also one of the few discussed here to explicitly draw out a point of interest to business managers, namely that "rational" ads should be shown by preference in the later afternoon and evening.
In spite of the general interest of this article, and the explicit bit of advice given above, this study is actually only of limited value to the TV marketer, who must take the audience when it is available, with an ad type appropriate to the product.
Scott W. Kelley, Steven J. Skinner, and O. C. Farrell. "Opportunistic Behavior in Marketing Research Organizations." Journal of Business Research, 18 (June, 1989), 327 40.
Kelley, Skinner, and Farrell examine th...