Market Sophistication

A five-level scale of how many times a market has already heard a claim, used to decide whether to lead with the promise, a bigger promise, a mechanism, a better mechanism, or identification with the reader.

Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising (1966)

What it does

Explains why a claim decays. Once competitors have copied a promise it stops carrying information, and the only remaining moves are to explain why yours works — the mechanism — or to stop arguing and address who the reader is. It gives a reason to abandon a message that is still perfectly true.

When it breaks

The level is asserted, never measured, and it is asserted about a whole market when sophistication is a property of an individual buyer's exposure history. Someone entering a level-five category for the first time has heard none of the claims. The scale also runs one way only: it says markets get more jaded and never less, which is contradicted by the constant inflow of new category buyers that keeps the naive level populated indefinitely.

Case

No direct test of the five levels was found. The closest measured analogue is the decline in advertising elasticity over time reported by Sethuraman, Tellis and Briesch across 56 studies published between 1960 and 2008 — the same spend moves less than it used to. That is consistent with markets becoming harder to move, and it says nothing about the five levels or about which one a given market occupies.

Sethuraman, Tellis & Briesch — Generalizations from Meta-Analysis of Brand Advertising Elasticities, JMR (2011) ↗

Diagram not yet drawn

The same claim repeated down five rows, each row fainter as the market absorbs it; the mechanism escalation drawn as a second claim starting at full strength on a shorter runway each time.

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.

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