ABSTRACT
The headline is from the “Lower Case” column in Columbia Journalism Review (2010), which in each issue features a group of such items taken from newspapers. The Tonight Show’s Jay Leno uses similar content in a feature called “Headlines.” The items indicate failure by writers and editors to see a potential for ambiguity, resulting in double meanings that readers find entertaining. Readers also see an implication that the writer’s goal may not have been achieved, which is humorous too, but also serious. Creators and audiences of all sorts of messages typically have goals to pursue, often via transmission and reception of accurate information. Ambiguity or other errors may thwart their purpose, especially when senders are left unaware of whether their intended messages were actually transmitted and whether recipients had accurate or inaccurate understandings of them. School teachers promote awareness of such problems with a brief game called “Telephone” in which students line up in a row. The teacher whispers a sentence containing some facts into the first one’s ear, then each passes the secret to the next. The last student in line states out loud what came through, which is almost always a seriously different message. The mix-up is so predictable that the game is played little by anyone beyond the teaching mode. Most communications in the real world, however, are transmitted outside teachers’ scrutiny and are free to create havoc that may remain undiscovered at critical moments. In the advertising world, research on messages has long been available and provides the best means for ad people to identify responses to advertisements and/or ad messages. A major type of response, as illustrated above, involves
what recipients understand the message to be telling them. While that response will be stressed here, the discussion applies also to other message effects, such as attitudes toward the advertised item, intention to buy, and buying brand loyalty. Such steps have been best described in work on Hierarchies of Effects, which although not emphasized in recent times, has been discussed at length in the past (Preston & Thorson, 1984; Preston, 1982). There are various other topics of advertising research, such as values, lifestyle, brand share, and media audiences. This chapter, however, addresses only research on responses to the ad message. The main point to address is that some ad people may obstructively reject or ignore research findings because of the unpleasant implications of the revealed responses. They then may impose substitute conclusions that, by being strictly personal viewpoints, are invalid, unreliable, and biased, failing to reach the standard of being scientific while also blocking the use of established methods. The principal goal of this chapter is to describe such preemption and examine how to minimize the havoc it can create. To begin, ad people have varying attitudes toward reports of how people respond to their creations. Some appreciate that messages can reasonably mean different things to different people and so are willing to accept research findings no matter how unpleasant they find such uncertainty. We may call these people the Flexibles. Other people refuse to accept uncertainty and prefer to conclude that only a single perceived message should possibly exist, applying to all of a message’s recipients to the exclusion of any other choices. While the Flexibles may be applauded for being open to having their hopes contradicted by research data, these other people see nothing to correct. They persist in the face of contrary findings, even if from research. They can appropriately be called the Inflexibles. As with Potter Stewart, their logic requires that anyone who disagrees with them cannot be right. Stewart was the Supreme Court justice who said he had no definition for pornography but then declared that “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964). He did not consider that others applying the same term to the same challenged media content might disagree on whether it was pornography. He seemed not to realize that the same conclusion could be reached only if all observers applied the same standard, i.e., the same set of facts, to the concept. Without such a shared basis, the social science weatherman could easily predict potential havoc just around the corner and, in fact, Stewart acknowledged later that he had drawn many questioning and negative comments about his statement. An old saying is that while we are entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own facts. What messages tell us are facts as we see them, and the Flexibles either acknowledge or at least do not reject the idea that perceptions of
message content may vary from one person to another. They may wish it weren’t so, but they appreciate that that’s how things work. The Inflexibles, by contrast, reject the idea of different people seeing different messages. Some of them do it with a quick and decisive reaction; they are the Knee-Jerk Inflexibles. They may, for example, use a secondary source such as a dictionary definition and say, well, that’s the meaning right there, for me and for everybody else. They are “reasoning” in their way, and they may be unacquainted with arguments that refute their method. They may be sincere in believing that when there is one message there should be but one response. Another group may be called the Agenda Inflexibles. They decide that people understand a message as they do because it supports a predetermined agenda they have. They would prefer not to acknowledge or discuss the agenda because of not wanting to expose the arbitrariness. So they copy the Knee-Jerk Inflexibles in claiming that their preferred understanding is the only one that can possibly exist. They may not be very sincere in doing so. This category of persons could be the biggest source of havoc concerning questions of what is communicated. In combination, the Flexibles see the possibility of uncertainty, the KneeJerk Inflexibles do not, and the Agenda Inflexibles do but pretend they do not. Any person may be any of the three types for any given message, and, by going from instance to instance, individuals can be any two or even all three types over time. The pertinence of these types of people to advertising theory and research is that Inflexibles reject not only other people’s contrary understandings but necessarily also any research findings that counteract their rejection. Yes, the business has copy testing (also called other names such as pre-testing or copy point playback). But the point here is not whether ad people have research but whether they respect it and use it. To reject it makes a big difference because research findings almost invariably support the Flexibles by finding a variety of understandings of messages. It would seem from this that we could use research as the antidote for the Inflexibles’ behavior. Their only evidence of what consumers perceive is in their own heads, while theory and research operate in the more pertinent location of consumers’ heads. Paralleling that strength, however, is the problem that the Inflexibles are poison for research. I propose the latter as a topic for study. The idea, coming from anecdotal observations over the years, of course, is speculative. It comes to mind because I have sensed for a long time that research on message response has no great acceptance from what I take to be substantial numbers of the people who actually make the ads-people such as copywriters and art directors-as contrasted to others such as account supervisors or top executives.
