4.2
Feldwick's Six Models
Six mutually incompatible theories of how advertising produces its effect, set out together because the industry uses all six while claiming only one.
Paul Feldwick, The Anatomy of Humbug (2015)
What it does
Sets six competing accounts of how advertising works — salesmanship, seduction, salience, social connection, spin, showmanship — side by side and declines to crown one. Its function is exposing which model your team has silently assumed.
When it breaks
It will not tell you what to do. Useful at the start of a brief, useless at the end of one.
Case
Cadbury's “Gorilla” (2007, Fallon London) is the cleanest live refutation of salesmanship-as-the-only-model: the ad made no product claim at all and worked through showmanship and salience. Cadbury reported Dairy Milk sales up 9% year on year and it ran as an IPA Effectiveness case in 2008.
IPA — Cadbury Dairy Milk case study ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
Six routes from ad to sale drawn as genuinely different mechanisms — not six labels on one arrow, which is how this always gets drawn wrong.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
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