Numbers or intuition?

Courage for intuition and unusual communication despite all experiential knowledge or evidence-based advertising.

Another campaign with a Hallelujah image? No, two at once, which we discovered during our latest competition research. Hallelujah images are what we call pictures in which a person (often with silver-gray hair) happily raises his or her arms, preferably retouched to a beach at sunset. In the last two years, we have found over 20 such ads. But even we can hardly remember which products were advertised with them. It is no different for the target groups. The senders can chalk up these ads to "money thrown out."
How can this be avoided? How do you know if advertising really works and achieves the intended goals? How is it that marketing managers, who after all are increasingly measured by return on investment, opt for such interchangeable campaigns and often deploy them worldwide with a lot of media spend.

Number hype

Probably most Hallelujah ads have been tested in market research and have produced good results. After all, nowadays people almost don't rely on their own experience or the opinion of experts, but hedge their bets with statistics and sets of rules.
Experience and intuition in general have recently fallen into disrepute. Common sense is now considered to be not so healthy. And expert knowledge is also no longer highly regarded. Cognitive researchers have also scientifically proven the inadequacies of our brains, which manifest themselves in fallacies or attribution errors. Prejudices, distractions and preconceived expectations tempt individuals to make wrong decisions.
Statistics and numbers therefore experience an unimagined hype. People prefer to rely on computer results (stock market trading), automation (industry), statistics (politics), click rates (communication) and guidelines (evidence-based medicine). This is a good thing at first, if statistics and numbers and the evidence-based decisions derived from them did not also have their weaknesses.
In market research, one also draws on people's experience, but one asks many people, forms statistical averages, and thus hopes to become less susceptible to bias in memory, perception, and decision-making. If the right questions are asked and the answers interpreted correctly, such tests can be valuable decision-making tools. But it is precisely in this "if" that the crux lies. The formulation of the questions, the interpretation of the data and answers are based on the personal experience of individuals, which, as described above, can consciously or unconsciously lead to quite different (fallacious) conclusions. The saying "Don't trust statistics you haven't falsified yourself", attributed to Winston Churchill, sums this up.
There is also a problem hidden in the calculation of mean, average or median values. In global market research, for example, major cultural differences often become apparent, but then people agree on the lowest common denominator. This leads to average. By definition, the average excludes the outstanding and the unusual. Excellent and innovative approaches are thus lost.

In search of excellence

The excellence of advertising should not be judged by how the audience finds it, but by the effect it has on the target group.
Unfortunately, however, the impact of advertising has not yet been sufficiently researched. It is a complex system in which many situational influencing factors play a role. There are hardly any systematic studies, unlike in medicine, where differentiated, randomized and controlled studies have been conducted for decades, comparing one therapy with others in terms of effect and side effects.
S. Armstrong, a marketing professor at Wharton USA, has collected about 3000 studies of experimental as well as empirical field research and 50 books with theoretical approaches to advertising effectiveness from a wide variety of academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, business administration, marketing, market research, communication science and behavioral economics. His conclusion: almost none of the studies meets the requirements of comprehensibility and precise definition of the initial conditions. Nevertheless, he tries to formulate principles for effective advertising based on this material. He calls this, in reference to medicine, "evidence-based advertising." Some of the advice is contradictory, some controversial, such as how to deal with fear appeals, but his rules for effective advertising in selected situations are the first to be scientifically validated.
Others are also working feverishly to explain the mechanisms of action of advertising. Evaluations of countless action data from the digital environment also provide "recipes for success." For example, e-mail automation providers are investigating the success of e-mails depending on the wording of the "subject line". While open rates do not yet say anything about actual changes in behavior and attitudes, with the concentrated power of Big Data, capture software and the progressive refinement of evaluations, even more smart insights will soon be found.
However, we have not yet reached the point where evidence-based advertising can actually and demonstrably deliver better results, and where numbers, statistics and science can fully explain the mechanisms of action.
Recent brain research is also providing increasing evidence of the impact of advertising. According to this, purchase decisions are predominantly determined by implicit, intuitive processes. This also provides an explanation as to why so many people love Hallelujah pictures. Pictures of happy people generate sympathy, through certain stimuli that act implicitly (in the subconscious) and evoke a feeling by matching it with our memories. But unfortunately, a second part is missing: the anchoring with the product. It's a misconception that by seeing lots of happy people in ads, consumers think "I have to buy this brand to be happy too." Sympathy, joy and life are messages that can be claimed by any industry or manufacturer....

Praise for experience and intuition

There is not yet a steadfast bulwark of evidence-based advertising that protects against all systematic errors in thinking. As long as there are no really good studies, we still have to rely on the experiential knowledge, gut feeling and intuition of experts. Despite all limitations, this is not as bad in comparison as numbers and statistics fetishists would have us believe. Experts know very well that advertising requires clear differentiation and that product anchoring is necessary. Creatives intuitively use their experience and knowledge, gained in many thousands of day and night hours, to create truly successful campaigns. For this, we value outstanding creatives, much like doctors who are valued by patients for this experiential knowledge.
The intuition of top creatives ensures that new, unusual solutions are found. Evidence-based rules, on the other hand, support egalitarianism and boredom. Orientation toward what has supposedly proven most effective in large studies supported by many figures ultimately leads to standardization. This is good in medicine because it brings more certainty, but in communication it is rather counterproductive. If everyone says the same thing and presents it in the same way, nothing will be perceived. Experienced marketing managers and agency people also know:
If there is no contradiction from market research, then there is no real new idea. Especially with today's information overload in all channels, innovative, unusual ideas are needed to get the target groups interested at all. Forward-looking ideas only emerge when people think beyond the usual dimensions. Such ideas arise intuitively, even if in the background there is hard work, a lot of experience and a good knowledge of the alternatives. Before and after that, really good creatives and strategists apply the knowledge gained from studies and research. Thus, everything new should be docked to the known, because according to neuro research (Schreier, referring to Nobel laureate D.Kahneman), the brain autopilot, which is responsible for fast, efficient information processing, reacts helplessly to completely new things that it cannot place in its pigeonholes.
In any case, we don't recommend hallelujah images, but rather the courage to try something new, even if market research once again favors the tried-and-tested lowest common denominator.