Why Use Norms in Advertising Research?
Your marketing department spends a lot time, resources and money building a marketing strategy, developing advertising creative, and buying media to reach your target consumers. You conduct research during the creative development phase to test your ad in order to understand its potential and you track the ad once it's in market to quantify the impact on your business.
The market research company conducts the survey, tabulates the results, and provides you with a score--let's say for example, in tracking, 30% of consumers recall the advertisement. Great! Almost a third of consumers remember seeing your advertising. But is that a good result? What percentage of consumers could or should you have expected to recall the ad?
This is where norms come in. Literally, a "norm" is the average score for other ads tested or tracked in the same way. So norms represent the "normal" outcome based on our experience with other ads. Norms tell us whether the result for this ad is better, worse, or about average when compared with other ads we have tested or tracked.
Advertising research depends on norms. Without norms, you really don't know what your scores mean.
For meaningful evaluations, we need to use norms that are defined like the ad we are evaluating on key variables:
- Same survey method
- Same ad medium (e.g., radio ads should be compared against a radio ad norm, not a TV ad norm)
- Same country or region (e.g., Canada vs. US or English Canada vs. French Canada)
- For TV ads, ad length (e.g., 15 second vs. 30 second ads)
- For ad tests, same level of completion (e.g., rough vs. finished)
- For TV ad tracking, similar level of GRP (Gross Rating Point) / TRP (Target Rating Point) support
The last point is particularly important when evaluating the performance of a TV ad in market. Creative must be assessed within the context of GRPs/TRPs to truly understand its performance as very different decisions and actions may be recommended depending on the cumulative exposure of the ad.
For example, let's look at the following graph of a hypothetical situation where the recall of an ad is 35%. If the ad had been supported with 250 GRPs/TRPs and the expected recall (or norm) is 20%, the conclusion would be that the ad is strong and should continue to be aired. However, if the ad had been supported with 1000 GRPs/TRPs in market and the norm for this level of GRPs/TRPs is closer to 50%, then the conclusion might be that the ad is week and should stop being supported.
What about industry? Is it important to compare the performance of your ad to a category specific norm? When an ad is aired, it competes for consumers' attention against all ads. As such, norms for "All Ads" are always relevant. They represent typical performance for the market as a whole. More specific norms are informative and can be very helpful, but are usually not absolutely necessary for meaningful evaluation. There are some exceptions when the target is very narrow or the category is very unusual. Pet and baby products are good examples of narrow targets and unusual categories that are difficult to evaluate with general norms.
In summary, when evaluating your ads either during a pre-test or in market, always ensure you are comparing against the most relevant norms to guarantee a fair comparison and accurate recommendation for not just recall, but also branding and consumer reactions to the advertising.
