For golf schools, the advertising brochure is a critical marketing tool. Selection of a school is largely based on the text contained in these brochures (which are mailed to prospective students who respond to ads in major golf magazines) since students rarely visit a school in advance and word-of-mouth advertising is not prevalent. Sales are gained or lost depending on the messages conveyed in the brochures.The Ben Sutton Golf School, Sun City Center, Fla., has a unique advantage over its competitors: all instruction is conducted under actual playing conditions on a real golf course - not a driving range or practice green.The task of communicating this major competitive advantage in the text of the school's new brochure fell to The Becker Group, a Canton, Ohio, ad agency. To do this, Glen Becker, president of the Becker Group, needed an objective critique of the new advertising copy. He turned to artificial neural network analysis.
Artificial neural networks identify complex patterns of information in text data and then determine the association among the different patterns. Thus, the technique is well-suited to analyzing several copy alternatives to determine which options best convey the intended message. Using neural network analysis, subtleties and potential trouble spots in advertising copy are detected early in the creative process.Alan Dutka, president of the National Survey Research Center, a Cleveland firm that performs customer satisfaction and other research for the Ben Sutton Golf School, says that "neural networks are appropriate when the research objectives are to determine the major ideas expressed in a text and to study the relationships among the words and phrases."An artificial neural network analysis generates quantitative information in three distinct phases:
These three phases were used to evaluate existing and new advertising brochures for the Sutton Golf School and also the brochur...