The role of cost and function in the effectiveness of specialty advertising

The purposes of this study were to determine (1) if including advertising specialties in a direct mail piece significantly increased response to the message of the mail, (2) if receiving specialties caused more invitees to attend a conference than did invitations alone, (3) if more expensive specialties were more persuasive than less expensive ones, (4) if two-function specialties were more persuasive than onefunction specialties, and (5) if the effect of specialties was higher on male or female subjects, higher on subjects working in one occupation rather than another, and higher on subjects with positive prior attitude than those with neutral or negative attitudes.

Five hundred adults were randomly selected for a controlled field experiment. The adults were men and women in the state of Tennessee whose jobs involved training, counseling, or hiring of youth in the state. They were invited to a three-day conference to discuss problems related to their responsibilities. Data on response to message were collected in the form of completed and returned attitude questionnaire designed for this study. Data on conference attendance came from the conference register. Usable data were gathered from 180 subjects.

Data were reported in frequencies and percentages to compare treatment groups with the control group; two-function specialties with one-function; high-cost with low-cost; male subjects with female; and four occupational categories against one another. There were two dependent variables: completion/return of questionnaire and attendance at the conference.

The findings showed some noteworthy trends. . A higher percentage of the treatment cases than the control completed and returned questionnaires and also attended the conference. The differences reached statistical significance at the .05 level on questionnaire return, but not on attendance.

One-function items attracted a higher percentage questionnaire return, but a lower rate of attendance than two-function items. The difference on questionnaire return reached significance level, but the difference on attendance did not attain significance, leaving an inconsistent picture of the effect of number of functions.

High-cost items elicited a higher rate of questionnaire return than low-cost items, and the difference reached statistical significance. On attendance, however, low-cost items did significantly better than high-cost, again showing the effect of cost as inconsistent.

Female subjects scored proportionately higher than male subjects on both questionnaire return and attendance. The difference on attendance was statistically significant, but the difference on questionnaire return was not. There were no significant differences among occupational categories.

There was some indication that subjects' prior attitude may have affected the influence of specialties, with positive cases having the highest rate of attendance. Neutral and negative cases were second and last, respectively, but the differences were not statistically significant.

It is concluded from the study that the positive persuasive impact of specialties is modest. It is worth emphasizing, however, that even though statistical significance was not attained in some of the measures, trends of practical significance were observed: specialties attracted higher response than control on both dependent variables; female subjects were persuaded more than were male subjects, making the sex of an intended receiver an important factor in the choice of a specialty gift.

Finally, neither number of functions nor cost of specialties seemed to make any consistent difference in the effectiveness of specialties. Effectiveness does not seem to depend on sending complex or expensive gifts.