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Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising
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Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising
A Study of 28 Enduring Myths



November 2003 | 328 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
"The book makes an interesting and substantive contribution to the field of advertising directly, and also to the entire field of marketing communications or promotion. John Philip Jones presents a new and informed perspective that supports and underpins the need for advertising that works rather than emotive rhetoric that obscures its purpose and function."

                                                                      --Philip J. Kitchen, University of Hull, U.K.

"This is a much needed text that puts misinformation to rest with strong evidence to disprove it. Most texts simply show how ads are developed, media plans are implemented, and lots of beautiful advertisements. This book shows how advertising can be and should be effective."

                                                                           --Jan S. Slater, Ph.D., Ohio University

The workings of advertising have always remained a bit of a mystery; until about 1960 virtually nothing of the effectiveness of advertising was known. There was even some doubt about whether advertising worked at all. In the absence of facts, theories were developed up to fill the vacuum. These were soon developed into doctrines, which became widely followed—fables that became fashions. Not many of these theories were ever subjected to harsh scrutiny based on factual knowledge, mainly because there was not much factual knowledge available until recently.
John Philip Jones, bestselling author and internationally known advertising scholar, has written a textbook to help evaluate these advertising "fables" and "fashions," and also to study the facts. He uses the patterns and trends revealed by the accumulations of data from cutting-edge research to illustrate the occasional incompleteness, inadequacy, and in some cases total wrongheadedness of these fables and fashions. Each chapter then attempts to describe one aspect of how advertising really works.

Unlike most other advertising textbooks, Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising is not written as a "how to" text, or as a vehicle for war stories, or as a sales pitch. Instead, it is a book that concentrates solely on describing how advertising works. Written to be accessible to the general public with little or no experience studying advertising, it makes the scholarship of an internationally renowned figure accessible to students taking beginning advertising courses.

Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising is ideal as a core or supplemental text for courses in marketing, communication, journalism, and related disciplines. This volume should also be useful to the tens-of-thousands of business people whose careers are directly or indirectly concerned with advertising.

 
Epigraph
 
Foreword
 
Acknowledgments
 
Advertising's Relationship to Business Generally and the Consumer
 
Chapter 1 Why Advertisers Advertise
Commonsense and Its Pitfalls

 
Consumer Orientation

 
One Voice, Many Voices

 
 
Chapter 2 Overpromise and Underdelivery
Advertising and the Consumer

 
Advertising and the Amateur Experts

 
The Role of Habit

 
 
Chapter 3 Added Values
Products and Brands

 
Functionality

 
Added Values - The Result of Planning or Coincidence?

 
A Lesson from Economics

 
Longevity

 
 
Advertising Strategy and the Difficulty of Locating Target Consumers: The Development of Creative Ideas; and Facts About How Much Advertising Produces an Effect
 
Chapter 4 "Why Exactly Am I Spending All This Money?
Ends and Means

 
Sources of Business

 
Knitting Together a Brand's Strategy

 
 
Chapter 5 How Many Fish Are There in the Pool? And Where Are They?
Mass Marketing - and the Search for Precision

 
The Reality of the Marketplace

 
Where Are the Fish Swimming in the Pool?

 
 
Chapter 6 The Advertising Imagination
Advertising's Patchy Performance

 
The Causes of the Trouble

 
"Bisociation"

 
Two Grab Bags

 
The Locked Strong Box

 
 
Chapter 7 Bursting the Dam Wall
The Imaginary Dam

 
Measuring How Advertising Produces Sales

 
The Effect of Increased Pressure

 
Are Diminishing Returns Universal?

 
 
Advertising Investments, Promotional Expenditures, Media Strategy and Media Tactics
 
Chapter 8 Overspending and Underspending
"Gut" Feel, Opportunism, Extravagance

 
Spending What a Firm Can Afford

 
Fact-Based Judgment

 
A Balancing Act

 
 
Chapter 9 Margins and How to Slice Into Them
The Pipeline

 
Pull Gives Way to Push

 
The Balance Tips Below the Line

 
Why Many Manufacturers Like Promotions - and Why They Are Usually Misled

 
 
Chapter 10 Fishing in Different Parts of the Pool
A Branch of Show Business

 
Do Media That Attract the Most Advertising Dollars Have the Greatest Horsepower to Produce Sales?

 
Does Television Reach All the Fish in the Pool?

 
 
Chapter 11 Regularity and Frequency
Media Planning: Fashions and Anachronisms

 
Two Traps for the Unwary

 
The State of the Media Art

 
 
How Advertising Works
 
Chapter 12 The Gatekeeper
Market Research: Transparency and Opacity

 
Good Cooks Make Biryani

 
Two Very Different Theories

 
 
Chapter 13 The Main Source of a Manufacturer's Profit
Lessons from a Visit to a Supermarket

 
Added Values - What Advertising Contributes

 
 
Researching Advertising - Before and After It Is Run
 
Chapter 14 Looking Before You Leap
Research and the Creative Process

 
The Emergence of the Focus Group

 
A Last-Minute Health Check

 
 
Chapter 15 Consumer Perceptions - and the Cash Register
Why Do Advertisers Track Consumer Perceptions?

 
Consumer Perceptions of Advertising

 
Consumer Perceptions of Brands

 
A Footnote on Sales Promotions

 
 
Chapter 16 Wheels and Their Reinvention
An Abandoned Heritage

 
Is Direct Response an Exclusively Specialist Technique?

 
IMC - Does It Have a Promising Future Behind It?

 
 
How Advertising Is Managed
 
Chapter 17 The Global Village
Different Tribes

 
A Brand's Position on Its Competitive

 
The Role of the Advertising Agency

 
 
Chapter 18 The Cinderella of Business
Advertising and the CEO - a Faded Relationship

 
Two Cultures

 
The Straitjacket

 
Does Advertising Matter?

 
 
Chapter 19 Volcanoes and Their Extinction
A Fascinating and Rather Sinister Business

 
Agencies on the Big Board
Three Items for an Advertising
Agencies on the Big Board
Three Items for an Advertising
Agencies on the Big Board

 
Three Items for an Advertising Agency's Agenda

 
 
Sources of Information
 
Chapter 20 The Expanding Universe of Information
A Small Corpus of Valuable Literature

 
Chapters and Sources

 
 
Bibliography
 
Glossary
 
About the Author

"The book makes an
interesting and substantive contribution to the field of advertising directly,
and also to the entire field of marketing communications or promotion. John
Philip Jones presents a new and informed perspective that supports and
underpins the need for advertising that works rather than emotive rhetoric that
obscures its purpose and function."

Philip J. Kitchen
University of Hull, U.K.

"This is a much needed
text that puts misinformation to rest with strong evidence to disprove it. Most
texts simply show how ads are developed, media plans are implemented, and lots
of beautiful advertisements. This book shows how advertising can be and should
be effective."

Jan S. Slater, Ph.D.
Ohio University

This is an interesting book but a bit too advanced for my 3rd year students. I will however, recommend it for ambitious individuals who want to really engage with advertising and demystify it.

Professor Olga Mitterfellner
Mode Management, Mediadesign Hochschule
August 26, 2015
Key features
  • Completely current on the important latest trends in advertising for teaching students about the discipline.
  • Written to be accessible to the general public with no previous study in advertising.
  • Can be used alongside any basic text or as a core text to bring together principles often lost in standard advertising texts.
  • Makes the scholarship of an internationally renowned figure accessible to students taking beginning advertising.

For instructors

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