Compliance strategies in direct response advertising

Rising personal selling costs, market demassification, and pressures for advertising accountability are often-mentioned forces accounting for the recent surge of interest in direct marketing. Dollar-wise, direct marketing is credited with billions in media expenditures and over a hundred billion in sales. Meanwhile, the state of theory concerning buyer or seller behaviors in this field is a notch above folklore. This study develops a working definition of direct marketing, which supports a benchmark measurement of its prevalence in magazine advertising.

Cialdini's taxonomy of communication strategies is used to content analyze a sample of magazine advertisements. Results indicate that while both conventional display ads and direct response ads rely mostly on friendship/liking strategies, direct response ads use a scarcity theme significantly more than do conventional ads. Moreover, direct response ads support their principal themes with implicit reciprocation in approximately 33 percent of the cases.