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The Awareness Fallacy

Caught this interesting pres from Mark Lester earlier today (via Propagation Planning by Griffin Farley). Smart and concise, it directly addresses the issue many of us have with the over reliance (both on client side as well as agency side) on awareness as a key measure of success. I’ve always felt like this was a tremendously limited metric (and part of a larger, flawed process ie the ‘purchase funnel’), even more so today, but I’d argue even in the old days when advertising fell into neat buckets and most people found out about new brands or products in more or less the same way. I’ve never really bought into the idea that human beings are such simple machines who follow a nice, linear path from awareness to purchase. It’s a bit more complicated (and more interesting) than that, and this deck does a nice job of exploring that complexity quickly.

Particularly like the last section around the way many marketers and marketing research processes confuse the relationship between attitudes and behavior, summed up nicely with this chart:

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Full pres is definitely worth a read to help get your brain working again after the holiday weekend.

via avin.posterous.com

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