Many advertisers believe that any mention of their product helps sell it. Not so, says Market Researcher Horace Schwerin. Actually, "quite a few advertising efforts do boomerang" and "leave people less favorably disposed toward the product than they were beforehand."
Schwerin cites one example of a typical TV drama about a-young married couple in which the husband is the bumbling idiot. A coffee commercial at the end of the program declared that the head of the household knows best about coffee brands, and pictured a pleased father drinking the brew and calling for it by name. The preconditioned viewers could not swallow...