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Want to create an effective advertisement?
Your best bet might be to ignore the product completely. Pick some pleasant music or a sexy spokesmodel. Make it funny. Remind people of the good old days.
Darrel Muehling's two decades of research suggest those may be the best strategies of all.
"Advertising isn't in the business of selling a product," said Muehling, a professor and chairman of the Department of Marketing at Washington State University. "It's more in the image-building or image-creation business."
Muehling has researched the influence of nostalgia in advertising, the long-term effectiveness of negative versus positive ads, and the influence of ads on people who aren't paying much attention, among other subjects. For his lifetime of work, he's being honored by the American Academy of Advertising later this month, one of just 14 people the organization has so honored since 1958.
People tend to be unreliable when you ask them whether advertising affects them. Most say it doesn't, Muehling said, but believe that advertising does affect other people.
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