The DAGMAR Approach (A&BM 21Sept2020)

The DAGMAR Approach

DAGMAR stands for Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Advertising Results. DAGMAR Model was developed by Russell Colley in 1961 for setting advertising objectives and measuring advertising results.

According to DAGMAR Model the ultimate objective of advertising involves a communication task, intended to create awareness, impart information, develop attitude and induce action.

DAGMAR was the study of Association of National Advertisers (ANA) that the goal of advertising is to achieve specialized objectives and it recognized that different advertisements can have a number of objectives.

 

“Advertising’s job, purely and. simply, is to communicate to a defined audience information and a frame of mind that stimulates action. Advertising succeeds or fails, depending on how well it communicates the desired information and attitudes to the right people at the right time and at the right cost.” Russel H. Colley.

 

The concept known as DAGMAR—Defining Advertising Goals For Measured Advertising Results.

 

The 2 core things on which the DAGMAR Model stood were

1. Creation of a communication task to achieve goals

2. Defining the objective of the communication tasks in a manner that the results can be measured.

 

A) The communication tasks involved in the DAGMAR approach.

A marketing task is a combination of an advertising activity, a branding activity and possibly a customer service activity. The work of marketing is holistic and hence it has to look at the whole organization. The work of Advertising is more individualistic and hence the organization is not considered.

To measure that a task assigned to advertising, is later on measured only in advertising terms, Russell Colley designed the communication tasks. Creating a communication task, which involves communications between the company and the consumer, was solely the responsibility of the Advertising department.

The goal of the communication tasks in DAGMAR was as follows

1. Awareness – Communication tasks involved making the consumer aware of the brand or the product.

2. Comprehension – These tasks also helped the consumer in understanding the attributes and the features of the product and what the product will do for the consumer.

3. Conviction – The communication task convinced the customer that this product was meant for them

4. Action – Ultimately, after conviction, the customer was to be enticed to take action.

 

B) Defining objectives in the DAGMAR approach.

The second most important task of DAGMAR was defining the objectives of advertising or of the communication tasks which were to be created. Once you defined the objectives, then the measuring of advertising results was comparatively easier.

With this move, Russell Colley also gave more responsibilities to the advertising department. Not only were they responsible for the ads made, they were also responsible for how well they understood the objective of advertising, and how they incorporated these objectives in their communication tasks.

In this modern age, we know that advertising is used for introducing a product, building brand eqtuiy, for sales promotions or for plain old brand recall. However, all these are the objectives of advertising and form the 2nd part of DAGMAR.

 

Communication Process in DAGMAR Approach

1. Awareness

Before the purchase behavior is expected from target audience it is necessary to make the audience aware with the product or company. The initial communication task of the advertising activity is to increase the consumer awareness of the product or offer.

 

 

2. Comprehension

Only Awareness is not be sufficient to stimulate a purchase, sufficient knowledge and information about product or organization is necessary. This step involves the target audience to learn something about product, organization, or offer. Here communication task of advertising activity is to make consumer learn about product - product characteristics, benefits, or uses.

 

3. Attitude or Conviction

At this step a sense of conviction is established. By creating interest and preference, buyers are moved to a position where they are convinced that a particular product in the class should be tried at the next opportunity. At this step communication task of advertising activity is to mould the audience’s beliefs about the product and this is often done through messages that demonstrate the product’s superiority over a rival or by talking about the rewards as a result of using the product.

 

4. Action

Finally, communication must encourage buyer to engage in purchase activity.

 

The objectives of advertising in DAGMAR are as follows

1. Concrete and measurable tasks – The tasks need to be a precise statement of what the advertiser wants to achieve through the communication. Does he want to strengthen the brand image, maximise the brand presence, penetrate new markets or increase overall sales?

2. Define the target audience – Before the communication task commences, the target audience needs to be defined as precisely as possible. Are you targeting youngsters, adults, elderly? Any of the various forms of segmentation can be used to define the target audience.

3. Degree of change sought – What level of perception, attitude or awareness of the customer do you want to change? If a customer is aware of the product, do you want his negative attitude to change to positive? Or if the market is completely unaware, do you want the whole market to be aware or only partially the target group itself? These degrees of change which are going to be the objective of the communication task need to be defined in advance.

4. Time period – To achieve the objectives of the communication tasks, how much time are you ready to allot. If you think that in a month, the product can create awareness in the complete market, then you are very wrong. That’s why major advertisers try to introduce the product for 3 months, and then communicate the features and benefits in the next 3 months so that the brand recall is high and the brand acceptance is high as well. A defined time period gives better measurability.

 

So as you could see from above, the DAGMAR approach involved defining the objective of a communication task, and then creating communication tasks which were themselves measurable.

The DAGMAR approach is used by many promotional planners to set plans of advertising and marketing. This approach is also used to set advertising objectives and to measured the results against the plan. Russell coley’s work has led to the improvement of the advertising world, because these communication tasks were not only sales driven, they achieved various goals of the organization only through Advertising.