INTRODUCTION
Advertising research or 'copy testing' is one of the oldest and prevalent methods of testing advertising copy effectiveness. On its advertising website, The University of Texas gives a brief definition of copy testing as "Research to determine an ad's effectiveness, based on consumer responses to the ad." Copy testing is crucial in order to establish which ads to use for an advertising campaign, as it is a guage for how people will respond to each respective ad. This final report contains copy-testing research for three brands of whiskey: Knob Creek, Maker's Mark and Jack Daniel's.
Whiskey, as is true with most alcohols, is a tough category to tackle in advertising. To begin with, there are obvious moral concerns when advertising a product such as alcohol, for many believe it is has a negative impact on society, as alcohol, though legal, is still considered a drug. Beyond that, there are such a wide range of alcohols that the category allows for consumers to form specific niches--for instance, there are many people who will only drink wine, while others may only drink beer. Within the hard-liquor categories, females tend to lean towards the vodka and rum brands while scotch and whiskey brands remain more male oriented. Whiskey itself has sub-categories, based on the distillation process. There are scotch whiskeys and Irish whiskeys, which are distilled two and three times respectively. American straight whiskey and malt whiskey are differentiated based on the number of grains used in distillation, in addition to the type of barrells the whiskey is distilled in. Bourbon whiskey is the name given only to those whiskeys distilled in the state of Kentucky, USA. All other whiskey are considered Sour Mash.
The three brands of whiskey that will be used in this study are Knob Creek, Maker's Mark and Jack Daniel's. Knob Creek and Maker's Mark is are both Kentucky Bourbon whiskey's while Jack Daniel's is a Tennessee Sour Mash whiskey, though they all have the same (or similar) distillation processes. Three print ads (one for each brand) were taken from three popular magazines: GQ, Maxim and Premiere. An on-line questionnaire was constructed and sent via email to over 500 initial recipients, however the total number of recipients is unknown as the survey may have been forwarded by the initial recipients to more people. 76 completed responses were obtained for this survey. Once all surveys were returned, the data was imported into SPSS and analyzed using various statistical approaches.
The purpose of this research was to examine brand preferences among three brands of whiskey and the effect the advertisements had on respondents' initial preferences for the three brands, common attributes associated with those brands, brand preference, and which brand has the highest preference. The results were examined for statistical significance in order to determine if a projection could be made in 85 or more samples out of 100 samples taken from the same or a simlar population as these 76 respondents.
The following report discusses the methodology used in developing the questionnaire, collecting the data and choosing a sample; an analysis of the statistical data that was collected; a summary; conclusions and the actual questionnaire along with the frequency outputs for each of the questions developed. Also included with this report, is the actual questionnaire used (Appendix B) and a questionnaire that has the frequency output (respondents' answers) for each question (Appendix A).