The Suits
Must Die.
Advertising at a Dead End.
Greg Stene, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Integrated Marketing Communication
Elliott School of Communication
Wichita State University
greg@mojocity.com
copyright 1996-2004
"A man who lives without reflection
cannot see that the back of his head is bald."
-- Cody Barstow, Barstow Ranch resident philosopher in Eastern Arts (2004)
Though this revered quote may appear to tell us that introspection is the key to understanding the unseen world around us, what it in fact says is that you need a mirror to see the back of your own head.
This book is that mirror for the advertising industry. We do not care much for reflection in advertising. That's just looking at the past. What we prefer is to just lunge wildly ahead into the future. Lunge - take the hits for bad advertising, find a new client ... take another lunge praying you get it right this time.We can't see that bald patch at the back of our heads. Or the worn shoe heels. Or the lumpiness of our butts. Or the mess we've made of the profession.
About a decade ago, the introduction of the business philosophy of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) was supposed to give us a new way to consider our business, and give us that mirror so we could reflect properly on who are and do our work better. But most people in advertising and PR still don't have a glimmer about what real IMC is, and most people are doing the same old crap in the same old way of doing business.
And clients suffer.
We're still looking for that mirror. That's why this book was written. A decade has passed since the pronouncement of the impossible glories of IMC and the simplistic mantra of Branding has vampired rational thought from most advertising strategists. And on the creative side of things where the public encounters our reality, little has changed. Most ads still suck.
getting ...
Forward
There's a war going on in the advertising industry.The suits against the creatives. There's the war.
Right now, as an advertiser, you might not give a rat's ass about your ad agency being at war with itself. This book will tell you why you need to be concerned.
This war between the creatives and the suits has been going on for years. It's been a fine tradition that we despise/dislike each other.Sterotype-time -- The suits are buttoned-down bean counters without a hint of inspiration. The creatives in advertising tend to be simply crazed and incapable of business-thought. One of us is the car on the train tracks. The other is the train.
It changes out a lot and one perspective rules for a while, and then the other rises to prominence. First business and rational thought ruled. Then we moved into a season of the creatives ruling. Now, with things tanking in the economy, we've turned to the false security and hope that a business orientation offers.As a result, there's a huge amount of very bad, uninspired advertising going on these days.
And within the profession, the suits seem to have launched a quiet offensive over the recent years. The suits -- the marketing business schools, the advertising account executives, agency owners, marketing directors, even clients ... over the years they've latched onto the ideas of Integrated Marketing Communication and Branding and they're gaining some strange form of scientific credibility. The suits have theory. They're beginning to win.
Which means that the creatives (the copywriters and art directors) are increasingly being controlled by what the research numbers say. We're moving away from the act of communicating in advertising, to making advertising that meets marketing goals. And all of us as people in the crossfire are going to have to put up with a lot more bad advertising assaulting us because of it.
We creatives are losing the chance to have a conversation with you people, the public about the products or services we're hawking. What you see now is bloodless MarComm thinking. Cold, passionless work controlled by marketing communication professionals who believe they understand human communication but do not have even a glimmer of what that conversation's all about.
A lot of the advertising coming at you these days is run-of-the-mill. Stuff you want to run from. If you were teaching it, you'd discover that the Introduction to Advertising text books generally have little to say about the creative process -- only 60 pages out of 690 in the text I'm using now are dedicated to the creative process.Instead, these books fill the students' minds with visions of market segmentation; recall, recognition, and attitude testing; and the typical marketer's diarrhetic output of charts and graphs which turn human behavior into nothing more than a mechanical plug-n-play system, with not a thought about what's going on inside the buyer's head.
Advertising is a process of communication and is not something that can be learned in most business schools. MarCom people come from business schools.
Concepts and the creative people who bring them to life are increasingly marginalized with techniques to test creative ideas that even the suits acknowledge are questionable. Clients demand accountability for the dollars they're spending, and in the process of trying to be accountable, agencies are paying more attention to the numbers (47% of the people like the ad, plus or minus 4% ... just what the hell does that really mean?) than they are to the people they're trying to communicate with. You. And me.
But we're people. Not numbers. And we don't fit into graphs and charts and the suits in the agencies and the clients who hire them have forgotten that truth.
The war has spread. It's not just between the suits and the creatives in the agency. The damage has spilled out into our society, and each one of us is involved in the advertising coming out of that war. It touches us with the advertising we see when we turn on the TV, open a magazine, or try to hide in the Internet. We're all combatants.
I know communication theory. I worked hard for that Ph.D. in communication that I've got. And because I've got about 15 years actually working in advertising as a creative person, I deal in theory that appeals to common sense and leans hard on experience. Doesn't seem to be much of that out there.
This is not rocket science. Too bad. Because rocket science is a piece of cake compared to understanding the human mind. And doing meaningful advertising. Advertising, in terms of communication is not a science that can be reliably reduced to numbers.
Take a look at how it plays out in commonsense terms. Meaningful advertising and flying both developed around the same time at the turn of the 20th century. Since those first crazed, fitful hops at Kitty Hawk, we've tossed men and women into space, landed on the moon, successfully lost several space research vehicles just as they were about to probe the glories of Mars, landed others successfully, and we have at least two vehicles pushing their way to the edges of our galaxy.1
Now, in contrast and over the same time period, what have we done in advertising that's so damned scientific? Well, we have yet to figure out what motivates a kid to buy a stick of gum. We have yet to figure out the assumed science behind the creativity of an ad. We have yet to figure out why an ad apparently affects someone the day after it has apparently not affected him or her. And we're still not sure what an "effect" really is.
A good number of people who study advertising mistakenly believe that the field is a science. These researchers are mostly marketing professionals and scholars whose livelihood depends on shoving numbers at you, because if you're a marketer and can provide your client with numbers, you can "prove" effects; and if you're a scholar and you can call it a science because you've got numbers, you can get research grants. How's the science worked out? I suggest a look at the failure of businesses in this country will tell us how well this science has worked out.
A high percentage of new businesses fail.2
Let's think about this for a second. If both business and advertising work scientifically, and if the research has any sort of meaning at all ... it would seem logical that all a new company would have to do is apply certain "scientifically proven-effective" business and advertising principles and it would survive. Even if you've got some greed-head cooking the books, or some idiot who can't keep them.
But the greater number of new businesses do go down the toilet. Sucked deep down with that nasty wad of toilet paper. Consider how many new products introduced by the major companies like Procter and Gamble3, who probably have every advertising research data-bit at hand in some computer ... consider how many of these new-product introductions by companies with scientific management expertise at hand fail.
These business failures suggest that there is no advertising science of any predictable kind going on here. And that anyone who says so is just plain horribly mistaken. Or worse.
Sometimes, it will be good to look at the common sense behind an advertising concept. To see what works and what doesn't. Those times will be titled:
A Question of Common Sense #1:
The number of milk-drenched TV spots and print ads that have come our way has been rather huge. You've got your white-milk mustache on all those celebrities. You've got a guy immobile in a hospital bed in a body cast begging for milk to go with the cookie he's just had fed to him.
Conventional wisdom is that this advertising has increased our consumption of milk.
That's a light-year from the truth. The amount of milk we drink as measured per person has dropped continuously since 1945.a
Everyone's blown it here. The marketers love the ads because they mistakenly think they work. The creatives love the ads because they look great and are highly creative and they really don't give a rat's ass about how effective they are, as long as they get to do another one.
The milk campaigns look great, have a lot of fun, and fail. Probably because the strategy is wrong, because the TV spots are small miracles of entertainment. Truthfully, the strategy behind the ads like the guy in a body cast in a hospital bed, and the one with the young man who has a Burr-Hamilton duel obsession being unable to speak out his contest-winning answer to a radio contest because he doesn't have milk to wash down the food in his mouth ... seems dead-on. What would life be like if we couldn't have milk?
But overall milk consumption continues to drop.
We do need the marketing people to find out why. But frankly, the marketers might screw up developing the new strategy simply because they're tuned in more to the product, than they are the target market. The marketing exec wants to sell more milk, and is focused on that mission. In contrast, the advertising folk look to the job as a process of communication that depends, in part, on discovering beliefs, impressions, and values people already hold about a product or product category, and communicating with them about those.
Two different worlds.
An interruption:
Something's gone horribly wrong with the textbook way that we're doing things. I'm teaching my advertising classes out of texts that reflect the accepted wisdom of the business, and while the students need to know the conventional way of thinking about this most unconventional business, I cringe sometimes at the stuff I have to talk about.
The old ways just aren't good enough anymore. Reality just is not as real as it used to be. It's time we realized that we've pushed into new territory, new thinking, a whole goddamned new age. People are smarter ... more savvy about advertising and the media; the markets are becoming competitive again; the Internet is going to continue to toss up a tremendous confusion of voices and the smaller players are going to look as good, if not better than the traditional players who currently control the market. Traditional brands can be challenged in the new market. People are posting home pages on the Internet bitching literally to the whole world about the quality of products and services.6We've got to do something to respond to it all ... something new, even if what we do is way wrong. At least that'll give us an idea of what not to do again. Branding-thought and IMC are not the answers. They have made no significant difference in the end-result in the ads or consumer response to them. And the creative quality of most work these years is far weaker than we saw from say, 1996-1999.
The new theory of Centered Thinking.
Sometime in the mid 80's, a now-worn but still interesting concept called positioning was the central theme guiding an overall understanding of advertising. Brand theory took over a while afterwards. But branding ultimately fails because it is not really consumer-centric, it is concerned with the brand. The product or service.
But consumers don't give a rat's ass about the brand, the product, or the service. They're concerned about themselves.
Using this perspective of the consumer as the ultimate concern of the consumer himself , this book offers a theory wholly developed around the consumer at even the cost of the product or brand. It's called Centered Thinking. The consumer/user is the absolute center of the universe in this perspective.
Note to the general public:
"I carry two guns, in case I run into the Doublemint twins."
-- Cody Barstow.
Centered Thinking straight-out violates the expectations and refined traditions you run into when you hear ad or marketing professionals, or the media intellectual darlings talk about advertising. In that sphere, everyone's respectful of each other and accepting even of thoughts and ideas they disagree with.
Some of those people are business pros who should know better, but can't manage a creative thought about the work they do. Caught up in charts, graphs, and numbers, and holding to some old ideas because they kind of work. Sort of.
Other voices out there are scholarly. Taking things under advisement. Even the absurd. Because to call someone a rat-bastard for thinking like an idiot is just not the way of things in scholarly circles. Perhaps it should be. Maybe then the scholars'd be a little more responsible for the absurd words and ideas they sling around.
In contrast to those who've spent their lives in only the ad business or the scholarly world, I was an ad pro and I've finished with the journey toward the Ph.D.7 I find myself in a rather happy nether-world of being relatively well-informed on both the professional and academic end of things, with absolutely no reason to be quiet or respectful in the process of discussion. So there will not be quiet, reasoned thought about Centered Thinking in this book. What you will find instead is loud, angry ... reasoned thought.
Get fed up.
This book is a call on the advertising communities of this country to improve the quality of the advertising that we, the people, must endure. Because enduring it is exactly what we have to do nearly every minute of our lives.
Advertising's everywhere. Look at your running shoes. Or your ball cap. Or your T-shirt. Or someone else's. Notice how, when you put your underwear on, you look at the brand label to figure out which side's supposed to go behind you and not in front (weird, that we depend on the brand label, not on the shape of the product to tell us front-from-back).
All of this is stuff that we all wear. Stuff that turns us into a walking, talking advertisement to other people for the companies that produced the product (I remember a long-lost lover's underwear and her appreciation for them, and the fact that they were Jockey and that I noticed the label every time I slipped them off her (branding's not a totally wrong idea); the over-the-hip style when it first came out, and that I remembered the name specifically for future reference ... not that I would buy women's Jockey's to wear, but maybe give her a pair as a gift, you know).
You pay a load for a Nike T-shirt in preference to a non-marketing shirt with no name on it, and you end up advertising Nike every time you wear the shirt. But you don't get paid a dime for it. The strange thing about this is the fact that the human body seems to be the only billboard that doesn't get paid for the advertising it does.
This body-imaging is probably some of the most effective advertising that can be done. Consider this ... you hang around a group of your friends. You need a pair of cross-trainer athletic shoes (they're now no longer simply tennis shoes or sneakers) because you're going to lift weights, and maybe run a bit, and mow the yard in them, so you've gotta have those cross-trainers which are built for a multitude of activities. You've seen the ads for Reebok in the magazines. But you've also seen the Nikes that your friend wears, emblazoned with the Nike "swoosh" on the side.8 You remember he's bought Nikes ever since you've known him. You don't even need to talk to him about them. He's already told you he likes them. He's shown you the Nike logo every time he wears them; not deliberately , of course, but just as a part of his body image. Reeboks must suck since your friend is wearing Nikes. And keeps buying them. This decision is a no-brainer. You buy Nikes.It looks like a brand decision. But the brand was only one of a housefull of cues the buyer went through in making the decision. Primarily -- this is a good friend wearing those shoes. Imagine the perspective if it were someone the consumer hated wearing the shoes. Centered Thinking locks on to the life-as-lived consideration of the consumer and can explain what will happen if the person wearing Nikes is evil. Brand is only a signaling device in CT. It is not the deciding factor.
You can easily and clearly explain what happened in Centered Thinking terms. But you have to bang your head hard into a wall repeatedly to explain it thoroughly in Brand theory ... you have to make a huge number of assumptions and logical leaps of faith because brand is only peripherally associated with the consumer. And the consumer is, in fact, everything.
Centered Thinking redefines advertising. The classical definition of advertising that a lot of people mistakenly still cling to define it in part as a paid form of sending a message, like buying space in a newspaper for a print ad. You see that kind of definition in almost every text book on the subject.9 That's idiotic. It's not enough. What your relationship with your good friend has done to your mind with his shoes has sold you more on Nike than any paid TV spot ever will. And that relationship itself is the advertising, far more than the brand ever could be.
On the idea of a whole new theory ...
A lot of the stuff that's being thought in advertising these days is not wholly wrong. And some intelligent new thinking about the way the reader relates to the advertising is now coming to the forefront in some areas.15
But the way in which we're currently looking at advertising and how the parts are put together don't work so well. So, in Centered Thinking, you'll see some thoughts that look familiar and feel a bit like the traditional elements of benefits, positioning, brand imaging, and others. Again, it's not that those thoughts are completely off-track, it's just that the combinations in which they've been assembled, and especially the consumer perspective lost by concentration on the product or relationship simply haven't been doing the job.It is interesting that the greatest challenges issued by CT come from the idea most closely related to it ... positioning. For example, while both positioning and Centered Thinking hold that the most important issue in advertising is how the target market perceives the product or service, both systems have significantly different ways of thinking about that perception, how it is created, and the consumer's uses of that perception. To its credit, positioning does attempt to climb inside the skull of the individual to determine the best position to take, but it does it from the marketer's perspective.
In contrast, CT eliminates the marketing background and seeks knowledge purely from the individual's perspective. And that perspective involves the entire gestalt of their lives ... from the morning's anger at a broken shoelace on the Nikes, to the birth of a child later that night. It is the totality of our lives that creates the way we think of things. Not just the advertising we're exposed to. This perspective requires an entirely new way of looking at the people we wish to communicate with.
And that is something the current trendy idea of branding fails at. Though it's been around for years and people continue to toss the word off like it were a mantra that would solve all problems, it can't. Because branding is essentially about the brand. It does not start with and continue with the targeted consumer for that brand. Some advertising and marketing people claim otherwise. But I've seen only a few people really attempt to practice consumer-oriented brand thinking.
In response to all these needs in terms of the consumer mentioned above, a new field of professionalism has finally come to advertising in the U.S., and it's called the Account Planner. The idea for this position was imported from the Brits, and it is centered on the consumer. The AP is a pseudo-consumer, acting as a member of the target market for the agency so they can see what sticks when the creatives toss ideas at him or her. A great idea. Way late in coming.
There is another shift in thinking going on here. Because Centered Thinking is located in how the consumer perceives information and not in the marketing perspective, issues absolutely central to positioning such as clutter, the competitive environment, and a hierarchy of preferences in product/service choice are either wholly eliminated or dealt with as nothing more than background noise.
This is heresy in almost any advertising theory.
There are also dramatic differences in the perception of the overall cause of the way the individual thinks about the product/service. Centered Thinking has a full and deep commitment to conceptually driven creative advertising as a part of creating the public's overall perception of the product/service, while the primary positioning proponents have declared that creativity is dead. This rejection of the importance of creativity is a marketer's perspective ... not a consumer's desire.
Ultimately, Centered Thinking is guided by the notion that theory needs to start more with the gestalt, the overall lifeway of the consumer, and the personal and cultural values of the individual ... more with those things than our advertising words and concepts, or even the product.
And here's the secret.
Advertising is communication.
Advertising is not marketing.
There's been a very mean and nasty trick played on the advertising discipline. For years, people have been told that advertising was a function of marketing. Hell, it's in the textbooks in college. It's got to be true, don't you know? And most organizations put advertising under marketing, so that advertising is just a tool of the marketing function.
No.
Advertising is communication. Marketing is number crunching and moving product from point-to-point and all that crap. Granted, marketing is also concerned with consumer behavior, which seems about as consumer-directed as you can possibly get. But consumer behavior is a study of consumers as if they were mildly amusing orangutans. It is not communicating with them on an equal level.
It is when you really understand the difference between advertising and marketing that you understand how all these bad decisions about advertising have come about ... it's because we have let advertising be led by marketing needs, desires, and theory.
It is the suits' failure to remember that advertising is communication. It's only when the creatives, the copywriter and the art director remember that they're talking with people that good work begins to emerge. And it is when the marketing people and all those other scary people who think in marketing terms get involved that we see good communications work turned into something that looks like the horror of the inside of a single guy's refrigerator. The cheese on the back shelf, in particular.
This idea is central to this book ... we need to look at advertising as communication. We must see it from the consumer's point of view, which is that advertising is a conversation, not marketing. The instant we begin to view either the advertising or the consumer from a marketing perspective, we have misunderstood what advertising is in the consumer's mind.
A completely boldfaced paragraph. Not a mistake.The consumer does not think of products or services in marketing terms. The consumer thinks in terms of his or her own life. And if you think in these terms, even well-accepted ideas such as the notion that there's a competitive product environment out there comes into serious question.
Even the assumed brilliance of the marketing idea of advertising clutter disappears. Clutter is a concept describing the idea of too much advertising cluttering up the environment, preventing the consumer from being able to single out a brand and make a clear choice. But the very notion of clutter disappears when you see the world from the consumer's mind, and not the marketer's.
You want tires? There's no advertising clutter. You look in the sports section of the paper and you find dealers. You look for low prices. You make your decision. Clutter-free. And brand rarely enters consideration.
You want a certain toy? You go to the phone book and look up toy stores. You find one close by. You call and see if they've got the toy you want. No clutter exists.
As consumers, we have strategies for finding what we want at the right price. There is no clutter.
The war.
The great creatives have been working within the idea of Centered Thinking for decades now. They've been shrugging themselves into the skins of their targets, wearing them for minutes or days and creating work that is immensely exciting and effective, The great creatives are our modern-age shamans, the medicine men and women who knew their world by shape-shifting into the bodies of the animals around them. Our true creatives in advertising are our shape-shifters, come back from the other world to tell us about their journey.
But creatives are not very good at coming up with theories that explain what they do. The marketing people are, however. And that's how they've held sway over the advertising field for so long. They came up with a theory. A number of them, with Branding only being the latest.
Centered Thinking give the creatives the theory they've need for so long. Because they are at war with the marketing types. And as wars go, this one is a natural and inevitable. The marketers are by nature consumed by their need to push product and they're totally locked into a product orientation. The good creatives are obsessed with understanding and communicating with people ... obsessed almost to the point of discarding the product from the conversation.
Centered thinking will likely heat up the war. There is now a clear way to think about the differences between marketing and the creatives in advertising. But perhaps as much as it defines the lines separating them, Centered Thinking may also provide for that no-man's land where negotiations can take place.
Not likely on an immediate level, however.
Because the suits would have to give up power. And they won't and that's bad because when the suits guide the advertising by imposing marketing perspectives on the work, the work moves away from the communication process that it really is. And it becomes the horrorshow we see too much of every day. So it's obvious what needs to happen.
The suits must die.
Oh there are a few rare rumpled suits that are comfortable people who know all about the idea of Centered Thinking. But most suits are perfectly pressed and manicured and without a clue. These are the ones who have got to let their need to control die off and remove themselves from the communication field of advertising. They can go do suit-things. And let the communicators, the creatives and the account planners, talk with the people.
1. "The Mars Global Surveyor [the satellite which will map Mars after the quite successful Pathfinder landing] became the first spacecraft in 21 years to orbit the planet successfully ... the last attempt, by Mars Observer in 1993, failed three days before it was to reach orbit." The New York Times, Craft Is On Track to Map Terrain of Mars, JOHN NOBLE WILFORD; Section A; Page 18; Column 4, September 12, 1997. The two Voyager satellites are now into more than 20 years headed out into space.
2. Various estimates exist. For example: a) Sacramento Bee, SHORT COURSE IN BUSINESS SAVVY, Gilbert Chan, Bee Staff Writer, BUSINESS; Pg. IB10, March 24, 1997; Quoting Deb Bowers, "Eighty percent of new businesses fail in the first three years." b) Chicago Sun-Times, Dreams can happen with good planning, Sue Morem, SECTION: FIN; WORKPLACE; Pg. 42, June 30, 1997, "Each year, entrepreneurs start more than 800,000 new businesses in the United States. More than 50 percent will fail within the first five years because of poor planning." Whatever the case, the rate is not terribly encouraging, nor does it suggest that business is generally a matter of proven scientific planning.
3. CMA - the Management Accounting Magazine, How to launch a new product successfully, Cooper, Robert G., SECTION: Vol. 69 ; No. 8 ; Pg. 20, October, 1995, "New products fail at an alarming rate. An estimated 46 per cent of the money that corporations spend on the conception, development and launch of new products is spent on losers - products that fail commercially, or projects which are cancelled prior to launch." The article went on to note that P&G was one of the organizations using a new system to reduce the investment in failed introductions.a. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Amberwaves/June03/DataFeature/ . And even though teenager per capita consumption of milk rose slightly in 2001-2002, overall consumption coninued to drop. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:U8sAc5n4EqAJ:www.dairyfoods.com/CDA/
ArticleInformation/news/news_item/0,6782,106819,00.html+per+capita+milk+consumption&hl=en . See also, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104742.html for a comparison of major food types per capita consumption 1990-2002.
4. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/technology/wired/story.html?s= z/reuters/980625/wired/stories/intel_1.html
5. http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/news/0622/26eserv.html
6. Look at a Web location http://www.webring.com for groups of home pages set up by individuals who are complaining about products or services. For example, at least two computer manufacturers are currently being taken to task by a rather large number of people.
7. My real mentors at the University of Colorado were some of the finest-thinking and most decent human beings I've had the pleasure of knowing.
8. In late 1997, the word was getting around that the Nike "swoosh" design had been bought for $35.00. It would be interesting to know if the corporation ever paid the designer any additional money out of sheer appreciation for developing a sign/symbol which could hold such meaning internationally.
9. For example; Contemporary Advertising, William F. Arens, 6th Ed., Irwin, p.6.
10. Insert any of your local used-car sales companies. You've got at least one fouling your TV air if you live anywhere near civilization. And what's this crap about "pre-owned" cars? Does anyone believe we really buy into that re-positioning?
11. This "CT" may seem like brand image, at first introduction. But I'm proposing that CT is a far more all-encompassing notion. Please see the closing of this chapter for a deeper discussion..
12. Clow stated that what he wanted to do with the 1996+ Nissan advertising (the Dream Garage, and all the spots featuring a cameo by an Asian character known as Mr. K (representing a real-life Mr. Katayama, a well-liked Datsun/Nissan representative in the U.S.), was to do something different from standard auto advertising ... to entertain people while they watched the TV spot. xxx
13. I was lucky. Was Military Police. Had a bed each night to sleep in. Got my share of snipers taking potshots at me, tripped a grenade booby trap that didn't go off, had enough weird things ... but I had a bed, a shower. Precious things to a grunt humping a ruck in the bush.
14. A single rating point, the way a program is rated, is worth about 970,000 households, which translates into even larger dollars when it comes to the cost of advertising on any particular show. See the Sacramento Bee, How Nielsen Selects The Families That Rate TV, Rick Kushman, April 20, 1997, Pg. EN6, for more information.
15. For example, David Glen Mick& Claus Buhl, A Meaning-based Model of Advertising Experiences, Journal of Consumer Research, 19, Dec. 1992, p. 317-338; Linda M. Scott, The Bridge from Test to Mind: Adapting Reader-Response theory to Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research, 21, Dec. 1994, 461-480.
