When a Hit is a Miss

Illustration by James Yang

Imagine you are channel surfing and you find yourself watching BET, a cable channel whose programming and advertising is geared to a mostly African American audience. As a middle-aged white person, you are interested, but you don't "get" all that you see. The show ends and a commercial for Tide appears. This appeal is very different from any you have seen for the detergent before. What are your attitudes toward the brand now?
      Then you switch to Lifetime, the cable channel geared mainly toward women, and see an ad for the movie Jerry McGuire. Unlike the commercial you saw while watching baseball on ESPN, this ad shows the tender but turbulent relationship between Jerry and his single-mother assistant. You wonder what happened to "Show me the money!" and the sporting scenes you saw in the other ad, and you ask yourself whether this is such a good movie after all.
      Sonya Grier, an assistant professor of marketing at the Business School, uses those scenarios in her study of targeted advertising in an increasingly diverse population. More and more, consumers outside a company's intended target market are exposed to targeted appeals, which can sometimes get companies into trouble. For example, the negative response of women's groups to the Stroh's Swedish Bikini Team television ad and its subsequent withdrawal might have been avoided had the campaign's effects on segments other than the target market of largely male beer drinkers been better understood. Grier, Jennifer Aaker, PhD '95, who is now on the UCLA faculty, and Anne Brumbaugh of Case Western Reserve University have examined the difficult questions raised by nontarget marketing--appeals aimed at one group that unintentionally reach another.
      To be sure, target marketing has been a driving force behind many successful brands. Among them are Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz, and Miller Lite. Typically, advertisers use different cues, such as gender, ethnicity, or age to target an audience. They also use non-source cues grounded in language, such as humor, slang, or editorial content. Creative cues may include music, culture, or tone. What medium the ad appears in, such as Sports Illustrated versus Hispanic Business, is also critical. Used together, these signals convey to a consumer that a particular product is meant for him or her. The problem is, it can also indicate that the item is not intended for someone. "If you don't know what the underlying psychological mechanisms people use to respond to ads are, you will continue to see ad controversies," says Grier.
      Grier, Aaker, and Brumbaugh recently conducted a study in which African Americans, whites, and gays viewed ads targeted to each group. Participants were asked to rank responses to the ads as favorable or unfavorable on a scale of one to seven. They found that distinctive groups, or minorities, responded the most favorably to ads targeted at them. African Americans viewing an ad featuring black characters were more positive than others. Whites viewing a gay ad were the most negative. Blacks viewing a gay ad were more tolerant of the ad than whites. Grier explains that minorities tend to view ads targeted at others less negatively because they are accustomed to being in the nontarget market. Gays reacted the most positively toward ads featuring gays and noted in some cases that they were predisposed to buy the product simply because the company supported the gay community.
      Minority viewers tended to react favorably to targeted ads because of heightened levels of felt similarity with a distinctive source cue. "If you take a white ad and put in a black person, it can increase a black person's preference for the ad," says Grier. "However, you can't just put a white person in an ad and expect whites to react. They need to sense some other similarity with the ad. Because whites are less conscious of being white per se, they have to have other cues in the ad that are not racial."

By BARBARA BUELL

"Nontarget Market Effects and Viewer Distinctiveness: The Impact of Target Marketing on Attitudes," Jennifer Aaker, Anne Brumbaugh, and Sonya Grier, GSB Research Paper #1391R, October 1997