One thing that the research consistently shows is that advertising influences purchase behavior. How does it do that? It changes how consumers think and feel about brands. This is where the Hierarchy of Effects (HoE) comes it. This has been to date the most influential framework for analyzing the intermediate effects of advertising, in both the academic and practitioner spaces.

The objective of many of the users of the HoE framework is to optimize advertising decisions. These can include content, copy, budgeting and media plans. According to this framework, advertising activates one of the three intermediate factors: cognition, affect, or experience. These in turn trigger consumers’ thought processes, bringing up emotions and memories, which may, in turn, move the customer from mere cognition to affect and experience.

The central idea is that advertising moves consumers through a sequence of mental phases, from being unaware of a brand to being aware, opening hearts and minds to the brand, and eventually purchasing it.

Other frameworks propose that advertising activates the three intermediate factors simultaneously. This results in driving brand sales. To date however, and to much surprise, there remains no comprehensive, empirical assessment of frameworks comparing and contrasting across different brands.

Researchers in this study, Koen Pauwels, Albert Valenti, Shuba Srinivasan, Gokhan Yildirim and Mark Vanheule analyzed how cognition, affect, and experience mediate advertising effects on sales. They gathered seven years’ worth of data from 178 fast-moving consumer goods brands in 18 categories. This they used to compare different models. Their findings? The integrated concept of the HoE framework allowed it to hold up remarkably well.

One important thing to note, the operating sequence varies across brands, with the predominant one being affect → cognition → experience (ACE). Moreover, category and brand characteristics such as the hedonic versus utilitarian nature of the category, brand differentiation and brand market share moderate which HoE sequence is more likely to hold for a brand. The incidence of ACE is stronger for utilitarian products and less so for differentiated brands. For managers, the results show that the last factor in the HoE sequence is most important in driving sales, while affect is the intermediate factor most responsive to advertising.

Read the full working paper.