Advertising and Consumer Behavior
Danial K. Stewart · Journal of Advertising · 1974
If the advertiser is to ever receive coherent explanations on the relation between his advertising and subsequent consumer behavior. then a few fundamental principles of science must be observed in the performance of research in this area. Explanations about the advertising-consumer behavior relation are significant to the extent that they yield the power to predict. Prediction is based on generalized causality relations, not statistical correlations. Coherent advertising research begins with hypotheses (definitions) of key psychological phenomena that have not been equivocated into physical phenomena either within the definition or the experimental design constructed for their isolation and identification.