Repetition, Familiarity and Desire

If you watch TV with any amount of regularity you have been exposed to an onslaught of pharmaceutical ads. The people in the ads all look happy and healthy despite the afflictions, illnesses or ailments they are representing.

The average American is exposed to 16 hours of pharmaceutical advertising per year. For a thirty second commercial that means the consumer will have seen drug ads 1,920 times in a year or an average of 5.2 times each day.

In 2007 pharmaceutical companies spent $9.3 billion to convince Americans that they might have symptoms of a health problem for which their products offered relief. They spend huge sums of money to get the repetition of the message that is key to success with advertising.

Knowledge that repetition works is not new. Studies about how consumers are affected by advertising date back to the Nineteenth Century. For nearly 125 years we have known that when a consumer repeatedly sees the same ad over and over, he eventually becomes familiar with the product.

Once the consumer is familiar with the product he accepts it without being aware of the shift in his thinking. Before long that acceptance turns to a desire for the product. The advertising works and a purchase is made.

Americans are exposed to much more advertising today than a century ago. Latest figures show that the average American is exposed in sight or sound to 3,200 ads per day in media, online, and in his environment. Attention spans are even shorter today, requiring more repetitions than ever to push consumers to the point of product familiarity.

Although we are armed with all this knowledge about the importance of repetition in advertising, there is impatience today among business owners who want big payoffs from short investments in their advertising. Each year on Super Bowl Sunday there are businesses that put their entire advertising budget into one, thirty second spot with the expectation that it will drive consumers to them by the hundreds of thousands (or even millions!). It never does.

In advertising, as in history, when we don’t pay attention to the lessons of the past we are doomed to repeat the failures. Although times have changed, human behavior is essentially the same. The mediums used for motivating and persuading have changed, but the psychology behind the persuasion has not.

In 1885 the Englishman Thomas Smith wrote his findings about advertising called “Hints to Intending Advertisers.” This is his documentation of how advertising works. (Because this is 1885, he is talking about print).

• The first time people are exposed to an ad they do not see it.
• The second time they do not notice it.
• The third time they become conscious of it.
• The fourth time they faintly remember having seen it before.
• The fifth time they read it.
• The sixth time they choose to ignore it.
• The seventh time they decide to read it again.
• The eighth time they think “here’s that confounded ad again.”
• The ninth time they start to wonder about it.
• The tenth time they think they will ask their friends or neighbors if they know anything about that product.
• The eleventh time they wonder how the advertiser can afford to keep running the ad.
• The twelfth time they think that it might be worth something.
• The thirteenth time they think it must be a good thing.
• The fourteenth time they start to think they want it.
• The fifteenth time they start to think about whether they can afford it.
• The sixteenth time they decide they’ll buy it someday.
• The seventeenth time they decide they’ll buy it soon.
• The eighteenth time they decide they can’t afford it now.
• The nineteenth time they figure out a way to afford it.
• The twentieth time they buy it.

There have been huge changes since 1885. People now use credit cards to buy even when they can’t afford it. And every product category is glutted with greater choices and more intense competition. But the premise is still true that with each repeat time consumers see or hear an ad they become closer to wanting what is promoted in the ad, until they eventually buy.

As you plan your advertising for 2009 think about consolidating your dollars in an intense ad campaign in fewer media sources to produce a greater potential for results than sporadic ad campaigns in many sources. Choose the sources that work best for you and put your advertising in them as often as possible.

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