ABSTRACT
Traditional measures of advertising effectiveness such as ad recognition, ad recall, ad liking, message take-away, brand awareness, brand image, and purchase intention confuse many advertisers. Mental measures are essentially diagnostic. They help with the problem of sorting out what is going on underneath the observed purchasing behavior. In 1959, a neurosurgeon by the name of Wilder Penfield inserted a microscopic electric probe into a patient’s brain while the patient was conscious. Conventional memory refers to retriggering some residue of a past experience. It means re-activation of that past experience as a conscious (explicit) memory which shows up as either recall or recognition. Recognizing something involves us in linking together the fragments people have seen—linking them by associative strengths into a ‘coherent’ representation in our mind. Activation spreads though the mental network like an electric current. As marketers, the retrieval cues people are interested in are brands, products, messages, and image attributes.
