A STUDY OF ADVERTISING SLOGAN RECALL IN THE FAST FOOD INDUSTRY

One of the most visible stimuli to which consumers are exposed is the advertising slogan. Advertisers should be concerned with the degree to which their campaign slogan is recalled and associated with product benefits.; An important element to consider in advertising slogan effectiveness is the characteristics of the audience to whom the communication is directed. The foundation of this dissertation has been to determine if certain demographic and media usage characteristics predict slogan recall. If certain target audience characteristics exist which predict slogan recall, then advertisers would be able to direct their efforts toward the specific predictor characteristics. Furthermore, if advertisers know which characteristics are present in those members of the target audience who do not recall advertising slogans, then efforts can be made to try other means of reaching that target segment.; In order to determine which demographic and medica usage characteristics are critical to the recall of advertising slogans, a set of hypotheses and a research instrument was developed. The fast food industry was selected for the study because of heavy usage of advertising slogans by fast food restaurants.; A stratified random sample was drawn from the population of Memphis, Tennessee. Based on a confidence level of 95 percent and 4 degrees of precision, a sample size of 700 respondents was used.; There were fifteen advertising slogans used in this study. The number of slogans a respondent was able to correctly identify was established as a dependent variable and selected individual slogans were also tested as dependent variables. Demographic and media usage habits were established as independent variables.; Correlation and regression analyses were used to measure the relationships among the variables. The variables age, marital status, sex, race, visits to any fast food restaurant, days per week read a newspaper, and times per week read a magazine were significant at the .01 level.; Therefore, there are significant characteristics which predict slogan recall. The predictor characteristics determined by this study should be given primary attention by advertisers when focusing communication efforts toward the target audience.