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AcademicBusiness Perspectives, 14 Mar 2024

Unusual ads in everyday places were tied to purchase intent twice as strongly as one-off stunts (0.42 vs 0.21)

Experimental

0.42

standardized effect of guerilla ambient marketing on customer purchase intention among 344 mall shoppers in Jeddah in May 2023

Reader Note:
Survey of 344 mall shoppers at three malls in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, May 2023; convenience sample, not random. 0.42 and 0.21 are standardized path coefficients: they show how strongly each tactic is linked to purchase intent on a comparable scale. They are not percentages or sales lift. Ambient marketing means unusual ads in everyday surroundings, such as odd sizes, colours or locations. Purchase intent is self-reported (“I intend to buy the brand”, “I will readily purchase the brand”, “I will recommend this brand to my friends”). The paper does not name the brands or campaigns respondents rated. One of the four questions used to measure ambient marketing already asks whether unconventional ads raise purchase intention, which likely inflates this link.
Evidence:
Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:
None
Sample:
Convenience sample of 450 customers from three malls in Jeddah; 370 responses returned, 344 valid questionnaires analyzed.

Good for

A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.

Not for

  • Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
  • This was measured in one market. It may not hold where you are.
  • The two groups were not split at random — they picked their own side. The difference may have been there before anything was measured.
  • The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
  • The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

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