Boomerang

Many advertisers believe that any mention of their product helps sell it. Not so, says Market Researcher Horace Schwerin. Actually, "quite a few advertising efforts do boomerang" and "leave people less favorably disposed toward the product than they were beforehand."

Schwerin cites one example of a typical TV drama about a-young married couple in which the husband is the bumbling idiot. A coffee commercial at the end of the program declared that the head of the household knows best about coffee brands, and pictured a pleased father drinking the brew and calling for it by name. The preconditioned viewers could not swallow that, according to Schwerin's figures, and belief in the advertiser dropped 30%.

On another program, a commercial for a cake mix neglected to talk about the product, told viewers instead about how tough things were in the kitchen before cake mixes were invented. As a result, lots of housewives bought cake mixes, but not the advertiser's brand.

Says Schwerin: "Advertising boomerangs occur much more often than is commonly realized . . . The effects, too, are neither quickly detectable nor readily traceable to the source." Researcher Schwerin's advice: more research.

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