4.15
Hierarchy of Effects
The model that advertising moves a buyer up an ordered set of mental steps — awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, purchase — each one a prerequisite for the next.
Robert Lavidge & Gary Steiner, Journal of Marketing (1961)
What it does
Gave advertising its intermediate measures. Before it, the only admissible evidence that an ad worked was a sale; after it, awareness and preference became legitimate things to track, which is the foundation under every brand tracker in use. That contribution survives whether or not the steps are ordered.
When it breaks
The ordering has been examined and not found. Hierarchy models neither describe the effects of advertising accurately nor conceptualise how advertising works as a market force, and forty years of reviews have failed to establish the sequence they assert. Treating the steps as prerequisites produces the standard error: money spent lifting awareness on the assumption that preference and purchase follow it on a schedule, and a tracker that reports movement at the top of the ladder as progress toward the bottom.
Case
Weilbacher's review in the Journal of Advertising Research sets out why hierarchy-of-advertising-effects models do not provide an accurate description of the effects of advertising, why they are not an accurate conceptualisation of how advertising works as a marketing force in the real world, and why — for as long as thinking is dominated by the hierarchy frame — the true effects of advertising are unlikely to be measured at all.
Weilbacher — Does Advertising Cause a ‘Hierarchy of Effects’?, Journal of Advertising Research (2001) ↗Diagram not yet drawn
The six steps as a staircase; over it, real buyers' measured paths as arrows that enter at the top, skip the middle four and run backwards — the staircase left visible underneath as the thing being contradicted.
In the wild
Unchecked · not part of the tier
What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.
Loading…