Quick Poll: Print Advertising Preferred by Most Consumers

The following Quick Poll survey was fielded February 2003 at SupermarketGuru.com, a web site dedicated to providing shopping and health information to consumers and, subsequently, consumer-attitude information to retailers and brand marketers.The site is the brainchild of Phil Lempert, food trends editor and correspondent for NBC News' TODAY Show and KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, a lifelong student of supermarket and food trends, and the site's eponymous "guru." Lempert has appeared numerous times on The View, Oprah, 20/20, CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC, as well as on local television morning and news programs throughout the country. He is a regular speaker at food industry conferences and conventions.Quick Poll Results: Print Advertising Preferred By Most ConsumersFebruary 22, 2003 Amazon.com, the pioneering online retailer, recently announced that it no longer will spend money on television advertising, preferring to concentrate on three ways to appeal to consumers:--Low prices --Free shipping on orders over $25 --Word of mouth (which it assumes it will get because of low prices and free shipping) This struck us as interesting, because in essence you have a high-tech company deciding to use a decidedly low-tech communication method to reach out to new customers.Which made us wonder what really attracts you to the store and to new products.The answers, as expressed in our SupermarketGuru Quick Poll, suggest a decidedly old-fashioned preference on the part of consumers:Fifty-eight percent of respondents told us that they learn about what their food store has to offer primarily through newspaper and magazine advertising, including inserts in the Sunday paper. Coming in second, at 19 percent of respondents, was direct mail, followed by word of mouth (13 percent), the Internet (five percent), television ads (three percent) and radio commercials (two percent).Fifty-two percent of our consumer sample told us that newspaper and magazine advertising is their preference for receiving such information. Direct mail was preferred by 16 percent of respondents, with the Internet at 15 percent, and word of mouth 13 percent. TV and radio ads got three and two percent, respectively.However, almost half of our consumer respondents (44 percent) did tell us that it would be more productive for them and for advertisers if they could get targeted ads via email that were crafted based on their needs and purchasing behavior. One-third of you told us, though, that they really don't want advertisers knowing that much about them, even if it resulted in more targeted ads.The real issue, which is whether advertising has any significant impact on your buying behavior, offered a mixed bag of results, with 18 percent of those polled saying it had a 'strong impact,' 20 percent saying it had 'some impact,' and 14 percent saying 'very little impact.' More than four out of five respondents said it depends on the product -- which, we suppose, is a good argument for better advertising, not to mention better products. Only five percent of those polled said that advertising has 'no impact' on their behavior.

Quick Poll: Print Advertising Preferred by Most Consumers

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

Related Images

Business Topic

Market Segment