Typology of Main Message Strategies for Television Commercials

Abstract A number of classification schemes have been developed to aid researchers, practitioners, and educators in identifying various types of message strategies employed in the advertising of consumer goods. These classification schemes range from simple dichotomies to very elaborate typologies. None of these classification schemes was found to be useful when we tried to categorize commercials for a research project relating to advertising effectiveness. Difficulties encountered when attempting to use the existing classification schemes led to the development of a new typology which seems to meet the criteria for a “good” classification scheme. This article discusses the weaknesses found in the existing schemes, describes this new typology, and provides the results of an empirical test of its classification ability.