The Renault Clio is regarded as the most successful launch campaign of any car in Britain and, according to Mr Robert Heath, the reason why "Papa and Nicole" shifted so many Clios was because, in an age of low attention spans, it didn't require consumers to pay any active attention to the commercial at all.
Mr Heath is one of the most influential thinkers in the industry and he will be in Dublin tomorrow to give the keynote speech at the Marketing Society's annual seminar. His 1998 book, The Hidden Power of Advertising, challenged the idea that advertising works by "persuading" consumers to buy on the basis of a rational argument about brand attributes.
The problem, he argues, is that when it comes to advertising, consumers have low attention spans. This is particularly true for television advertising which is sandwiched between programmes that themselves don't demand dedicated attention from viewers.
The basis of his theory is that brand information has to be "acquired" by consumers and the way to build brand attributes is to communicate them in such a way that consumers can passively pick up information and unconsciously memorise what they see and hear and then link it to a concept. He has called his widely debated theory "low involvement processing". "Consumers don't expect to learn anything of real importance about brands from advertising," says Mr Heath, "so they are not predisposed to pay much attention to it."
"Papa and Nicole" were very definitely French, which had an implicit meaning of "stylish" and all that rushing around the countryside for romantic assignations gave the car "sexy" associations. The message was delivered at an implicit level, so consumers were able to memorise it quickly. "Implicit learning," he says, "is automatic and it is used every time an ad is seen or heard."
The curious thing about the success of the Clio campaign is that viewers failed repeatedly to recall the supposedly persuasive message about the car -small car performance, big car comfort - but had strong positive associations with the brand.
Once something is learned on an implicit level, it is more likely to prompt an emotional or intuitive response. German domestic appliances, cars and power tools carry premium price tags because consumers intuitively believe that German engineering is better.
"Where advertisements go wrong is where they need to get people's attention before they communicate the message," says Mr Heath.
The Tesco advertisement featuring Prunella Scales as Dotty, won industry effectiveness awards in Britain, according to Mr Heath, not because of the often funny script or the products it features but because the implicit message is that Tesco easily and happily satisfies the most demanding and difficult shopper. If a viewer wanted to actively pay attention, specific product related information was contained in each 30-second spot.
He wasn't surprised to hear last week that the National Safety Council's hard-hitting television campaign won the top award for advertising effectiveness from the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland. "It provokes a visceral response, which is easy to process," he says.
"Press advertising is much more effective and more potent than is generally acknowledged," he says, "because it works at a low involvement level where you scan an advertisement and see a logo or whatever and also at a high level where you can sit down and actually read the whole thing."
