RepressionA major barrier to accuracy is what psychologists call Repression. It is the tendency of people to accept a new message into their minds and then unconsciously erase the conscious memory of how the message got in. Repression is more likely when the message arrives via publicity than via advertising. In other words, many people will readily acknowledge that they were persuaded by advertising but will refuse to acknowledge that they were persuaded by publicity. This interesting phenomenon demonstrates a major strength and a major weakness of publicity. The strength is that, like all forms of propaganda, publicity can cause an idea to enter the target's mind secretly. The target himself supplies the secrecy, by repressing the memory of how the idea entered. He convinces his conscious mind that he discovered the idea without assistance. Accordingly, he takes some pride in "his" idea, and holds onto it tightly. He may even begin to proselytize others. The weakness is that you can't accurately measure the effectiveness of your publicity by asking people to recall how they became interested in a product or service – because most of them don't recall.
Alaska and Costa RicaRepression even affects sophisticated people. For example, many years ago the tourism department of the State of Alaska was spending a fortune with a large public relations agency. (I was an employee of the agency at that time, but I didn't work on the Alaska account.)In spite of the blizzard of publicity placed by the agency, I ran into many people, even people who worked at the agency, who said they had decided to vacation in Alaska because they had "always wanted to go there." Out of morbid curiosity, I would ask the agency people if they had ever noticed any editorial coverage about Alaska. The answer was always "no." Costa Rica did even better. It enjoyed two decades of non-stop publicity. The publicity helped change the country's reputation from a refuge for shady financiers such as Richard Nixon's buddy Robert Vesco to a trendy eco-paradise. In those days, a lot of people, even PR people, dreamily repeated the mantra, "I've always wanted to go to there." Tracking Is Much More AccurateIf you are assessing how people decided to make a purchase or other decision, and you have been using different marketing vehicles including publicity, your data will be skewed if you rely on the recall of the public. Repression is too common: too many people will have repressed the memory of your publicity.To get more accurate data, you can use
Tracking.
It is much more accurate than depending on memory – especially when public relations campaigns are involved.
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