iv. Measurement.
The success or failure of any promotional campaign, regardless of the product or service, can only be judged against a predetermined measure, as well as an expectation, which must be built into the campaign. Without such a measure, then there is no purpose to the campaign since it cannot be fully evaluated.
It would appear from this campaign, that no such measure was applied. This is because from the outset, there has been no publicised expectation of what the campaign should achieve. In fact, the reverse has been true, as any expectation has been deliberately withheld.
In this case, the Norwegian Seafood Export Council has commissioned Oystein Myrland of the University of Tromso to 'measure' the success or failure of this campaign. According to his interview with Fish Farming International, Professor Myrland has evaluated the campaign by sending out questionnaires after the conclusion of each phase. The aim of the questionnaire was to identify those who had seen the campaign and could remember it without being prompted.
Ultimately, Oystein Myrland wanted to discover the answer to four key questions: -
- Had they seen the TV ads?
- What was their general attitude towards salmon?
- Where did they place salmon in terms of importance within their own portfolio of fish products?
- What was their actual consumption of salmon in relation to other fish products?
However interesting the answers to these questions, non-are able to provide a measure of whether the generic campaign was a success or not. In fact only one o f the four questions related to the campaign at all and this was the first; had they seen the TV ads? And even this question is largely irrelevant.
Comments made by Jack Robert Moller of EFF from the outset suggest that the aim of the campaign was to bring about an increase in demand, which would be identified by an increase in sales from the first weeks onwards.
The aim to increase sales must indicate that the only measure as to whether the campaign was a success or not is whether there has been an incre ase in sales of salmon in each of the target markets, over those in the weeks before the campaign began. This does not relate to the import figures into each market but specific consumer sales. An increase in imports does not necessarily mean that sales h a ve increase since the salmon could be destined for processing into a totally different product, e.g. Smoked salmon, canned salmon or ready meals, non-of, which would feature in the survey. Equally, the salmon could be destined for another market altogethe r and therefore an increase in imports, however desirable, can never be a measure of the success of such a campaign.
The only way that the true impact of the campaign can be measured is by monitoring the actual level of sales of salmon in each market, just before, during and after the campaign. Such information can only be obtained from stores selected specifically for this purpose. Trouw Aquaculture provides an example of this type of evaluation in their Outlook magazine number 12. This identifies increas ed sales of trout in the south west of England during a TV based promotion.
Professor Kinnucan has dismissed this type of approach (private correspondence). He suggests that such sales information includes significant extraneous factors and that in order to evaluate it most effectively, it is necessary to obtain information about the price of the advertised product and the prices and advertising expenditures for competing products. In addition, other market forces, which might affect demand e.g. consumer income and seasonality, must be held constant. Professor Kinnucan's view might be relevant to an academic study, but most farmers are more likely to be interested in the simple fact as to whether the campaign has persuaded consumers to buy more fish.
In addition to the sales data, the Trouw promotion also identified consumer attitudes to trout both during and after the campaign. However, like other consumer surveys it avoided asking the specific question as to whether the respondent had actually bought t h e fish as a result of the campaign. One of the reason why this type of question rarely features on consumer surveys is due to the very nature of the questions which are usually multiple choice and do not allow for either a yes or no answer nor one which permits an independent response.
However, if there is no data to support actual sales, the only questions that must be asked and which are relevant to the campaign are: -
- Do you already buy salmon?
- Did you see the advert?
- Did the advert prompt you to buy salmon?
- Will you buy salmon again?
Oystein Myrland has said that the evaluation of a generic campaign is much harder than for a comparable branded product. This is because the producer already knows the production costs and has control over output. This means that clear sales and price objectives can be set and therefore measured. He says that a generic campaign is more difficult to control since rising demand will allow prices to strengthen and thus encourage producers to increase output wh ich in turn may cause prices to fall again.
Unfortunately, this view is mistaken, since the cyclical process to which he refers is so lengthy that it would only be relevant if the industry conducted an almost permanent promotional campaign. Professor Kinnucan has suggested in his private correspondence that empirical evidence indicates that salmon producers are well able to expand output within 1-2 years of a price rise. This would then lead to the possibility that the promotion might cause price disequilibrium (demand outpacing supply and then supply outpacing demand). The real problem is that like other Professors of Agricultural Economics before him, who have considered the problems of the salmon industry, there is an assumption that the industry is experiencing the cyclical behaviour of a mature agricultural industry. This assumption is wrong for salmon farming is still undergoing continued growth, which has been interrupted only by deliberate and forced interference. Salmon farming has not yet reached the cyclical stage to which he refers.
In addition, there is absolutely no reason why sales cannot be measured in exactly the same way as for branded goods by sampling selected stores and thus obtain a true measure of the success or failure of the campaign.
Professor Kinnucan suggests that this may be appropriate for targeted campaigns that use point of sale material. However, for reasons such as the extraneous market forces, he believes that this approach can be misleading. This is because generic adve rtising cannot exert any control over other elements of the marketing mix such as price and product. If this is the case, it must be questionable as to whether generic promotion is the most relevant approach to the continued expansion of the salmon market .