Alma Cheese Company
... that had a small advertising budget and appeared only in magazines. The most important constraint in this case is Alma Cheese Company being a medium sized company from a relatively small country (Austria), trying to make headway against far bigger firms in a competitive foreign market, which is the United States, a market where American consumers did not associate Austria with cheese producing at all. On the other hand, the least important constraint is some Americans growing conspicuous about imports and more prone to prefer domestic products. “Portfolio testing” is a standard pretest method used for print ads. It involves placing the prototype ads in a folder – “portfolio” along with actual ads for various products, showing these ads to consumers, and then asking them questions related to the ads they saw. “Portfolio testing” strengths include; 1. Testing both the unaided and aided recall of the advertisement 2. Probing consumers’ impressions of the ads that they recalled- whether an ad was informative, easily understood, appropriate to the product being promoted, believable, etc… 3. Actual small scale testing before investing the entire budget in advertisements that would yield unsatisfactory results 4. Understand the consumers’ personal attitudes towards advertising, towards foreign versus domestic products, towards shopping, and about magazines they read regularly. “Portfolio testing” weaknesses include; 1. Selected consumers being ¬exposed to the prototype ads only once. Critics tend to believe that in order to form “emotional conditioning”, repeated exposures are needed to build the desired links in consumers’ minds. 2. The artificial testing situation is far removed from everything, which constitutes “the consumer’s” natural reading procedure. “Country Image Transfer” is the creation of “country of origin effects” through the process of “emotionally conditioning” consumers, via advertising, so that the consumers would come to associate positive national images with products produced in a nation. Ultimately, this process would result in an emotionally positive and unique brand image for the product being advertised in the consumers’ minds. In the Alma Cheese Company case, this idea is incorporated into an actual real world advertisement that can be clearly seen in the first prototype print advertisement that depicts members of the Mozart Boys...