This post is part of my bachelor paper ‘The Evolving Role of Creativity in Brand Management’. You can read the introduction, other posts and the table of contents here.

While the ideas of Feldwick and Heath “offer a more plausible explanation of how 30 seconds of apparent nonsense, watched through half-closed eyes, can affect brand preference and buying behaviour, than the old idea of the ‘selling proposition’” (Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.51) there is another perspective that, while agreeing in the rejection of persuasion and the rational message, instead sees the role of advertising in “creative publicity”, as marketing science’s sage Ehrenberg (2002, p.7) labeled it.

Ehrenberg concluded early that advertising “is not as powerful as is sometimes thought, nor is there any evidence that it actually works by any strong form of persuasion or manipulation” (Ehrenberg 1974, p.25 qtd. in Heath & Feldwick 2008, p.40). In fact, in an article published in 2002 he listed brand differentiation and persuasive advertising as some of the marketing’s most persistent “romantic fantasies” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.1).

According to his decade-long research into buying behaviour “[p]eople don’t differentiate in that way among most brands. It has been shown repeatedly that users of brand A feel about brand A much as users of brand B feel about brand B” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.2). Consumers are then not loyal in the strictest sense but really polygamous buyers of a set of habitual brands:

“In a year, say, customers of brand A in a product category typically buy its competitive brands B, C, D, etc. in total more often than they buy brand A itself. It follows that if the consumer wants the product — he or she is nearly out of gas, or coffee, or condoms, or needs a hotel room for the night — then he or she has no great difficulty in choosing a familiar and more or less look-alike brand.” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.3)

This means that advertising for an established brand can hardly persuade people into a differentiating attitude change nor can it persuade them to more loyalty, as those things hardly vary from brand to brand within a category (Ehrenberg et al. 2002, p.9). What advertising can do however, is create publicity for the brand, i.e. present it to the public and remind it that it exists.

“The realistic task for advertising is not to change what people think about your brand, which is always hard to achieve, but to have them think about your brand at all.” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.4)

Ehrenberg argues that advertisements usually don’t feature persuasive content and that it consequently doesn’t change people’s opinions (Ehrenberg et al. 2002, p.7). This is also coherent with what communication researchers have long argued for regarding the agenda setting function of mass media, i.e. that media does not tell people what to think, but more what to think about (McCombs & Shaw 1972).

What advertising does by creating creative publicity is affecting the brand’s salience, which – according to Ehrenberg is the best measure of a brands’ success.

“Salience concerns the ‘size’ of the brand in one’s mind (Romaniuk and Sharp, 2002b), i.e., all the memory structures that can allow the brand to come forward for the wide range of recall cues that can occur in purchase occasions. With this “share of mind” come feelings of being familiar and feelings of assurance (‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. It should be all right.’). That is our broad designation of “Salience”—awareness and memory traces, plus familiarity, plus assurance.” (Ehrenberg et al. 2002, p.11)

As there is usually a long time-lag between an advertising exposure and the actual act of purchase, effective advertising requires long-term memory (Ehrenberg et al. 1997, p.9). This associations in long-term memory are built on the one hand by repetition and on the other hand through all kinds of other brand exposures, such as WOM, brand usage, POS or even recalling memories. Once associations are stored in the long-term memory, they are hardly ever completely forgotten. As people build highly individualized memory-structures, “[p]ublicizing a brand is [.] about what consumers do with the advertising rather than what advertisements do to consumers […]” (Ehrenberg et al. 1997, p.10). So with long-term memory in mind, advertising’s task is then to find creative ways to publicise the brand, refresh and build new memory traces and “to make the brand distinctive rather than differentiated” (Sharp 2010a, p.353).

Ehrenberg argues that this ‘mere publicity’ perspective might actually be liberating for creatives, as advertising then becomes “making distinctive and memorable publicity for the brand out of next to nothing” (Ehrenberg 2002, p.16) and communication being less inhibited by the self-replication of one single minded proposition (ibid.)

“The Ehrenbergian view places much greater importance on creativity, on branding, on understanding memory structures. It is a positive story for advertising practitioners, many of whom were attracted into the advertising industry by creative brand-oriented advertising.” (Sharp 2010a, p.353)

This point of view on advertising leaves the very individualized perspective of hierarchy of effects models behind, in that it focuses on making the brand salient for the public. It states that the more people view a brand as salient, the more buy it and the bigger the brand will become. Thinking about publishing, however, always implies thinking of a public, which is usually comprised by more than one person. Therefore, criticising advertising’s and brand management’s individualistic view of consumers, Mark Earls argues that human behaviour and advertising might actually be better understood from a herd perspective.

“The publicity model itself would seem to be built on the notion that advertising can – even for large and stable brands – work through the herd: it draws the attention of the herd towards the brand and stops it being forgotten by the herd. The examples of tribal advertising cited by Cova and Cova (2002) would also seem to support this view;” (Earls 2003, p.328)

Advertising then, is viewed as something that “[...] sometimes at least, works in the context of groups rather than individuals” (Earls 2003, p.327) and creativity’s role is to make something salient in the context of social networks, not of isolated consumers.

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Ehrenberg, A., Bloom, H., Barnard, N. & Kennedy, R., 2002. Brand advertising as creative publicity. Journal of Advertising Research, 42(4), S. 7–18.

Ehrenberg, A., 2002. Marketing: Are you really a realist? strategy + business, 27(Second Quarter 2002), S. 22–25.

Ehrenberg, A., 1974. Repetitive Advertising and the Consumer. Journal of Advertising Research, 14(2), S. 24–34.

Ehrenberg, A., Barnard, N. & Scriven, J., 1997. Differentiation or salience. Journal of Advertising Research, 37(6), S. 7–14.

Heath, R. & Feldwick, P., 2008. Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International Journal of Market Research, 50(1), S. 29.

McCombs, M.E. & Shaw, D.L., 1972. The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), S. 176.

Sharp, B., 2010. Ehrenberg’s View of Advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 50(4), S. 352–353. Available at: [Zugegriffen März 8, 2011].

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