Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer

Rating:
Summary: Breakthrough thinking
Review: I have been consulting in the advertising business and have taught
graduate level advertising courses for over 20 years. I have never found a book that brought so much insight to the advertising issues associated with effective selling. I highly recommend this book to all.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written and Full of insights
Review: The book dissects the advertising process and analyzes the different elements that make up the ad.

Backed by years of tracking TV commercials down under, Max Sutherland has first-hand knowledge of what qualities make an ad work and what others make no or a negative difference in the ad's effectiveness.

The book commences with an introduction to advertsing's facts of life and a clarification of what is substantial and what is not in the public's perception of the industry.

It ends with a couple of interesting chapters that introduce the reader to the basic concepts of ad-effectiveness research. All in all, a good and solid book.

It does, however, use brand examples throughout that are known only to Australian readers and primarily discusses broadcast advertising.

Rating:
Summary: This book should to be in the top 20 marketing books
Review: The subject of the book is advertising, the expertise of the author is marketing research and its background is psychology. However, the text is highly suitable for marketing professionals. Why ? The reason is that it gives practical tools for marketing decisions concerning advertising, tools that have long time beeing denied by advertising agencies. As many marketing professionals may know, ad agencies have built several "recipes" or "éclairs d'imagination" never giving their foundations. Instead, Max Sutherland gives clear guidelines, combining them with the correspondant motivational background and/or justifying them by facts. Additionally, the book is very well written to allow the reader to take the core conclusion of each chapter.

Rating:
Summary: Advertising for pleasure and profit
Review: This book is great. It cuts through the hype, the b.s., the nonsense. Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) has a view on advertising, but not many have a view that is as comprehensible and as reasonable as that expressed by Max Sutherland in his book. Combining psychological theory with good doses of common sense, Professor Sutherland reminds us what so many of us tend to forget -- that marketing and advertising is practice supported and expanded by theory.

Advertising as a domain tends to be dominated by either practitioners or academics. The practitioners can have a tendency to do a lot of 'hand waving.' That is, they talk a lot, it may even look pretty impressive, but they don't necessarily talk a lot of sense. The academics for their part are caught up in theory. The academics ignore the real world as it presents (or at least may present) a disturbing set of facts that inconveniently do not match the truth of the theory.

Max Sutherland manages to bring the two sides of practice and theory together masterfully. In fact, it is really hard to decide from reading the book whether he is an academic or a practitioner -- it is perhaps not surprising to find that he is a bit of both. He's done well to bridge the gap between these two worlds.

The book's 'bite-size' chapters make it especially readable for anyone. And the reader can pick and choose from the range of topics that are offered - such as subliminal advertising, conformity, silent symbols and badges of identity, vicarious experience and virtual reality, etc. This is a book that will be enlightening for both the practitioner and the academic, and a delight for any person, including a lay person, to read.

This is advertising for pleasure and profit!

Rating:
Summary: Well Written and Full of insights
Review: To all advertisers and consumers; This is a must for your knowledge. Finally, a book that evades the 'magic' of advertising and pins down the psychological factors that make an ad succesful or not. It is seen from every point of view; the advertiser, the consumer and even the psychologist. It will change the way you advertise and see ads As an advertising student I found it to be my little bible.Get it!

Rating:
Summary: Advertising a mystery no more!
Review: You won't find any glitz or glamour in this book, just very intelligent writing about why advertising really works - and how to create advertising that works.

The wonderful part about this book is that it provides you with the key measures you need to use in seeing whether or not your advertising is/has worked. When clients want to justify their budgets, agencies can now help them do this by translating the results of their creative work into hard numbers.

For anyone serious about knowing how to create great advertising, this is a must read.